that you will take an interest in my little Armand. Come, then,
we beg of you, and with your beauty and your grace, your playful fancy
and your noble soul, enact the part of good fairy to my son and heir.
You will thus, madame, add undying gratitude to the respectful regard of
Your very humble, obedient servant, LOUIS DE L'ESTORADE.

XXX. LOUISE DE MACUMER TO RENEE DE L'ESTORADE January 1826.

Macumer has just wakened me, darling, with your husband's letter. First
and foremost--Yes. We shall be going to Chantepleurs about the end of
April. To me it will be a piling up of pleasure to travel, to see
you, and to be the godmother of your first child. I must, please, have
Macumer for godfather. To take part in a ceremony of the Church with
another as my partner would be hateful to me. Ah! if you could see the
look he gave me as I said this, you would know what store this sweetest
of lovers sets on his wife!

"I am the more bent on our visiting La Crampade together, Felipe," I
went on, "because I might have a child there. I too, you know, would be
a mother!... And yet, can you fancy me torn in two between you and
the infant? To begin with, if I saw any creature--were it even my
own son--taking my place in your heart, I couldn't answer for the
consequences. Medea may have been right after all. The Greeks had some
good notions!"

And he laughed.

So, my sweetheart, you have the fruit without the flowers; I the flowers
without the fruit. The contrast in our lives still holds good. Between
the two of us we have surely enough philosophy to find the moral of it
some day. Bah! only ten months married! Too soon, you will admit, to
give up hope.

We are leading a gay, yet far from empty life, as is the way with happy
people. The days are never long enough for us. Society, seeing me in
the trappings of a married woman, pronounces the Baronne de Macumer
much prettier than Louise de Chaulieu: a happy love is a most becoming
cosmetic. When Felipe and I drive along the Champs-Elysees in the
bright sunshine of a crisp January day, beneath the trees, frosted with
clusters of white stars, and face all Paris on the spot where last year
we met with a gulf between us, the contrast calls up a thousand fancies.
Suppose, after all, your last letter should be right in its forecast,
and we are too presumptuous!

If I am ignorant of a mother's joys, you shall tell me about them; I
will learn by sympathy. But my imagination can picture no