return
for some of his impertinent chaff regarding my uncle Barbassou's will.
Louis fell into the trap like any booby. But for him to have drawn you
with him, is enough to make me die of shame.

Madam, I prefer now to make my confession. I am not the hero of a
romance of the Harem. I am a good young man, an advocate of morality and
propriety, notwithstanding the fact that you have often honoured me with
the title of "a regular original." Be so good as to believe, then, that
the most I have been guilty of is a too artless simplicity of character.
I did not suppose that Louis would show you this eccentric letter, for I
had expressly enjoined him to keep it from you. My only crime therefore
in all this matter has been that I forgot that a woman of your
intelligence would read everything, when she had the mind to do so, and
a husband like yours.

In fact, madam, I hardly know why I have taken the trouble to excuse
myself with so much deliberation. I perceive that by such apologies I
run the risk of aggravating my mistake. What did I write, after all, but
a very commonplace specimen of those Arabian stories which girls such
as you have read continually in the winter evenings, under the eyes of
their delighted mothers? When I consider it, I begin to understand that
your laughter, if you did laugh, must have been at the feebleness of my
imagination--you compared it with the Palace of gold and the thousand
wives of the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid.--But please remember, once more,
that I am a poor Provencal and not a Sultan.

"My tastes are those of a simple bachelor."

Observe moreover that, out of regard for probability, no less than from
respect for local colouring, I was obliged to decide upon a somewhat
simple harem, and to confine it within the strictly necessary limits.
Like a school-boy, falling in love with the heroine he has put into his
story, I found myself so charmed with my fancy, that in order to further
enjoy my pleasures of illusion, I determined not to overstep the limits
of a perfectly realisable adventure.

But since I abandoned myself to this folly, does it not seem to you,
reconsidering the matter, that a great deal would have been lost if such
a romance had never occurred to me? And above all if it had stopped
short at the first page? Is it not astonishing that no author had
thought of writing such a thing before? Would not this have been just
the work for a moralist and a philosopher, worthy at onc