rown or golden heads, leaping, running through our
shrubberies and flowery paths. Oh! it is a cruel jest of Nature's, a
flowering tree that bears no fruit. The thought of your lovely children
goes through me like a knife. My life has grown narrower, while yours
has expanded and shed its rays afar. The passion of love is essentially
selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings. How well
I felt this difference when I read your kind, tender letter! To see you
thus living in three hearts roused my envy. Yes, you are happy; you have
had wisdom to obey the laws of social life, whilst I stand outside, an
alien.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the
loss of her beauty. I shall soon be thirty, and at that age the dirge
within begins. What though I am still beautiful, the limits of my
woman's reign are none the less in sight. When they are reached, what
then? I shall be forty before he is; I shall be old while he is still
young. When this thought goes to my heart, I lie at his feet for an hour
at a time, making him swear to tell me instantly if ever he feels his
love diminishing.

But he is a child. He swears, as though the mere suggestion were an
absurdity, and he is so beautiful that--Renee, you understand--I believe
him.

Good-bye, sweet one. Shall we ever again let years pass without writing?
Happiness is a monotonous theme, and that is, perhaps, the reason why,
to souls who love, Dante appears even greater in the _Paradiso_ than in
the _Inferno_. I am not Dante; I am only your friend, and I don't
want to bore you. You can write, for in your children you have an
ever-growing, every-varying source of happiness, while mine... No more
of this. A thousand loves.

LIII. MME. DE L'ESTORADE TO MME. GASTON

My dear Louise,--I have read and re-read your letter, and the more
deeply I enter into its spirit, the clearer does it become to me that
it is the letter, not of a woman, but of a child. You are the same old
Louise, and you forget, what I used to repeat over and over again to
you, that the passion of love belongs rightly to a state of nature, and
has only been purloined by civilization. So fleeting is its character,
that the resources of society are powerless to modify its primitive
condition, and it becomes the effort of all noble minds to make a man
of the infant Cupid. But, as you yourself admit, such love ceases to be
natural.

Society, my dear abhors sterility; but