e" to the King of the French? How can I have qualms with a friend
at Court, a great financier, head of the Audit Department? I defy you to
arraign my sanity! I am almost as good at sums as your citizen king.

Do you know what inspires a woman with all this arithmetic? Love, my
dear!

Alas! the moment has come for unfolding to you the mysteries of my
conduct, the motives of which have baffled even your keen sight, your
prying affection, and your subtlety. I am to be married in a country
village near Paris. I love and am loved. I love as much as a woman can
who knows love well. I am loved as much as a woman ought to be by the
man she adores.

Forgive me, Renee, for keeping this a secret from you and from every
one. If your friend evades all spies and puts curiosity on a false
track, you must admit that my feeling for poor Macumer justified some
dissimulation. Besides, de l'Estorade and you would have deafened me
with remonstrances, and plagued me to death with your misgivings, to
which the facts might have lent some color. You know, if no one else
does, to what pitch my jealousy can go, and all this would only have
been useless torture to me. I was determined to carry out, on my own
responsibility, what you, Renee, will call my insane project, and I
would take counsel only with my own head and heart, for all the world
like a schoolgirl giving the slip to her watchful parents.

The man I love possesses nothing but thirty thousand francs' worth of
debts, which I have paid. What a theme for comment here! You would have
tried to make Gaston out an adventurer; your husband would have set
detectives on the dear boy. I preferred to sift him for myself. He
has been wooing me now close on two years. I am twenty-seven, he is
twenty-three. The difference, I admit, is huge when it is on the wrong
side. Another source of lamentation!

Lastly, he is a poet, and has lived by his trade--that is to say, on
next to nothing, as you will readily understand. Being a poet, he has
spent more time weaving day-dreams, and basking, lizard-like, in the
sun, than scribing in his dingy garret. Now, practical people have a way
of tarring with the same brush of inconstancy authors, artists, and in
general all men who live by their brains. Their nimble and fertile wit
lays them open to the charge of a like agility in matters of the heart.

Spite of the debts, spite of the difference in age, spite of the poetry,
an end is to be placed in a few days