motherhood. I have made mine. My children shall be my gods, and this
spot of earth my Eldorado.

I can say no more to-day. Thank you much for all the things you have
sent me. Give a glance at my needs on the enclosed list. I am determined
to live in an atmosphere of refinement and luxury, and to take from
provincial life only what makes its charm. In solitude a woman can never
be vulgarized--she remains herself. I count greatly on your kindness for
keeping me up to the fashion. My father-in-law is so delighted that he
can refuse me nothing, and turns his house upside down. We are getting
workpeople from Paris and renovating everything.

X. MLLE. DE CHAULIEU TO MME. DE L'ESTORADE January.

Oh! Renee, you have made me miserable for days! So that bewitching body,
those beautiful proud features, that natural grace of manner, that soul
full of priceless gifts, those eyes, where the soul can slake its thirst
as at a fountain of love, that heart, with its exquisite delicacy,
that breadth of mind, those rare powers--fruit of nature and of
our interchange of thought--treasures whence should issue a unique
satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years,
joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,--all this
is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish
in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate
your children before they are born. They will be monsters!

So you know all that lies before you; you have nothing left to hope,
or fear, or suffer? And supposing the glorious morning rises which will
bring you face to face with the man destined to rouse you from the sleep
into which you are plunging!... Ah! a cold shiver goes through me at the
thought!

Well, at least you have a friend. You, it is understood, are to be the
guardian angel of your valley. You will grow familiar with its beauties,
will live with it in all its aspects, till the grandeur of nature,
the slow growth of vegetation, compared with the lightning rapidity of
thought, become like a part of yourself; and as your eye rests on
the laughing flowers, you will question your own heart. When you walk
between your husband, silent and contented, in front, and your children
screaming and romping behind, I can tell you beforehand what you
will write to me. Your misty valley, your hills, bare or clothed with
magnificent trees, your meadow, the wonder of Provence, with its
fre