arlor, and a dining room. Above our floor again are three rooms
destined for the nurseries. I have five first-rate horses, a small light
coupe, and a two-horse cabriolet. We are only forty-minutes' drive from
Paris; so that, when the spirit moves us to hear an opera or see a new
play, we can start after dinner and return the same night to our bower.
The road is a good one, and passes under the shade of our green dividing
wall.

My servants--cook, coachman, groom, and gardeners, in addition to my
maid--are all very respectable people, whom I have spent the last six
months in picking up, and they will be superintended by my old Philippe.
Although confident of their loyalty and good faith, I have not neglected
to cultivate self-interest; their wages are small, but will receive an
annual addition in the shape of a New Year's Day present. They are all
aware that the slightest fault, or a mere suspicion of gossiping,
might lose them a capital place. Lovers are never troublesome to their
servants; they are indulgent by disposition, and therefore I feel that I
can reckon on my household.

All that is choice, pretty, or decorative in my house in the Rue du
Bac has been transported to the chalet. The Rembrandt hangs on the
staircase, as though it were a mere daub; the Hobbema faces the Rubens
in _his_ study; the Titian, which my sister-in-law Mary sent me from
Madrid, adorns the boudoir. The beautiful furniture picked up by Felipe
looks very well in the parlor, which the architect has decorated most
tastefully. Everything at the chalet is charmingly simple, with the
simplicity which can't be got under a hundred thousand francs. Our
ground-floor rests on cellars, which are built of millstone and embedded
in concrete; it is almost completely buried in flowers and shrubs, and
is deliciously cool without a vestige of damp. To complete the picture,
a fleet of white swans sail over my lake!

Oh! Renee, the silence which reigns in this valley would bring joy to
the dead! One is awakened by the birds singing or the breeze rustling in
the poplars. A little spring, discovered by the architect in digging the
foundations of the wall, trickles down the hillside over silvery sand
to the lake, between two banks of water-cress, hugging the edge of the
woods. I know nothing that money can buy to equal it.

May not Gaston come to loathe this too perfect bliss? I shudder to think
how complete it is, for the ripest fruits harbor the worms, the mo