to God and to ourselves for
the means we employ to keep happiness alight in the heart of our homes.
Far better is the calculation which succeeds in this than the reckless
passion which introduces trouble, heart-burnings, and dissension.

I have reflected painfully on the duties of a wife and mother of a
family. Yes, sweet one, it is only by a sublime hypocrisy that we can
attain the noblest ideal of a perfect woman. You tax me with insincerity
because I dole out to Louis, from day to day, the measure of his
intimacy with me; but is it not too close an intimacy which provokes
rupture? My aim is to give him, in the very interest of his happiness,
many occupations, which will all serve as distractions to his love; and
this is not the reasoning of passion. If affection be inexhaustible,
it is not so with love: the task, therefore, of a woman--truly no light
one--is to spread it out thriftily over a lifetime.

At the risk of exciting your disgust, I must tell you that I persist in
the principles I have adopted, and hold myself both heroic and generous
in so doing. Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in
its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in
Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but
is none the less virtue. Each human life is a substance compacted of
widely dissimilar elements, though, viewed from a certain height, the
general effect is the same.

If I wished to make Louis unhappy and to bring about a separation, all
I need do is to leave the helm in his hands. I have not had your good
fortune in meeting with a man of the highest distinction, but I may
perhaps have the satisfaction of helping him on the road to it. Five
years hence let us meet in Paris and see! I believe we shall succeed
in mystifying you. You will tell me then that I was quite mistaken, and
that M. de l'Estorade is a man of great natural gifts.

As for this brave love, of which I know only what you tell me, these
tremors and night watches by starlight on the balcony, this idolatrous
worship, this deification of woman--I knew it was not for me. You can
enlarge the borders of your brilliant life as you please; mine is hemmed
in to the boundaries of La Crampade.

And you reproach me for the jealous care which alone can nurse this
modest and fragile shoot into a wealth of lasting and mysterious
happiness! I believed myself to have found out how to adapt the charm of
a mistress to the position