ernand the Barony
of Macumer; I must make a new will. My brother will forgive me; he knows
what it is to love!"

I owe my life to the care of my brother-in-law and his wife; they want
to carry me off to Spain!

Ah! Renee, to no one but you can I speak freely of my grief. A sense of
my own faults weighs me to the ground, and there is a bitter solace in
pouring them out to you, poor, unheeded Cassandra. The exactions, the
preposterous jealousy, the nagging unrest of my passion wore him to
death. My love was the more fraught with danger for him because we had
both the same exquisitely sensitive nature, we spoke the same language,
nothing was lost on him, and often the mocking shaft, so carelessly
discharged, went straight to his heart. You can have no idea of the
point to which he carried submissiveness. I had only to tell him to go
and leave me alone, and the caprice, however wounding to him, would be
obeyed without a murmur. His last breath was spent in blessing me and in
repeating that a single morning alone with me was more precious to him
than a lifetime spent with another woman, were she even the Marie of his
youth. My tears fall as I write the words.

This is the manner of my life now. I rise at midday and go to bed
at seven; I linger absurdly long over meals; I saunter about slowly,
standing motionless, an hour at a time, before a single plant; I gaze
into the leafy trees; I take a sober and serious interest in mere
nothings; I long for shade, silence, and night; in a word, I fight
through each hour as it comes, and take a gloomy pleasure in adding it
to the heap of the vanquished. My peaceful park gives me all the company
I care for; everything there is full of glorious images of my vanished
joy, invisible for others but eloquent to me.

"I cannot away with you Spaniards!" I exclaimed one morning, as my
sister-in-law flung herself on my neck. "You have some nobility that we
lack."

Ah! Renee, if I still live, it is doubtless because Heaven tempers the
sense of affliction to the strength of those who have to bear it. Only a
woman can know what it is to lose a love which sprang from the heart and
was genuine throughout, a passion which was not ephemeral, and satisfied
at once the spirit and the flesh. How rare it is to find a man so gifted
that to worship him brings no sense of degradation! If such supreme
fortune befall us once, we cannot hope for it a second time. Men of true
greatness, whose strength and wo