y home, you submit
your pleasures to a periodic thinning, as you do your timber. Oh! rather
let me perish in all the violence of the heart's storms than live in the
arid atmosphere of your cautious arithmetic!

As girls, we were both unusually enlightened, because of the large
amount of study we gave to our chosen subjects; but, my child,
philosophy without love, or disguised under a sham love, is the most
hideous of conjugal hypocrisies. I should imagine that even the biggest
of fools might detect now and again the owl of wisdom squatting in your
bower of roses--a ghastly phantom sufficient to put to flight the most
promising of passions. You make your own fate, instead of waiting, a
plaything in its hands.

We are each developing in strange ways. A large dose of philosophy to
a grain of love is your recipe; a large dose of love to a grain of
philosophy is mine. Why, Rousseau's Julie, whom I thought so learned, is
a mere beginner to you. Woman's virtue, quotha! How you have weighed up
life! Alas! I make fun of you, and, after all, perhaps you are right.

In one day you have made a holocaust of your youth and become a miser
before your time. Your Louis will be happy, I daresay. If he loves you,
of which I make no doubt, he will never find out, that, for the sake of
your family, you are acting as a courtesan does for money; and certainly
men seem to find happiness with them, judging by the fortunes they
squander thus. A keen-sighted husband might no doubt remain in love
with you, but what sort of gratitude could he feel in the long run for a
woman who had made of duplicity a sort of moral armor, as indispensable
as her stays?

Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues,
conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it is
not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us. I cannot but think
you have been trying to justify in your own eyes the frightful position
of a girl, married to a man for whom she feels nothing more than esteem.
You prate of duty, and make it your rule and measure; but surely to take
necessity as the spring of action is the moral theory of atheism?
To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every
woman's heart. You are acting a man's part, and your Louis will have to
play the woman!

Oh! my dear, your letter has plunged me into an endless train of
thought. I see now that the convent can never take the place of mother
to a girl. I