he had yielded less
to my request than to his own desire to talk of that strange
passion. Do you blame me, darling mother, for having wished to
reconnoitre the extent of the grief, the open wound of the heart
of which you warned me?

So, eight hours after receiving the rector's blessing at
Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, your Sabine was in the rather false position of
a young wife listening to a confidence, from the very lips of her
husband, of his misplaced love for an unworthy rival. Yes, there I
was, in the drama of a young woman learning, officially, as it
were, that she owed her marriage to the disdainful rejection of an
old and faded beauty!

Still, I gained what I sought. "What was that?" you will ask. Ah!
mother dear, I have seen too much of love going on around me not
to know how to put a little of it into practice. Well, Calyste
ended the poem of his miseries with the warmest protestations of
an absolute forgetting of what he called his madness. All kinds of
affirmations have to be signed, you know. The happy unhappy one
took my hand, carried it to his lips, and, after that, he kept it
for a long time clasped in his own. A declaration followed. _That
one_ seemed to me more conformable than the first to the demands
of our new condition, though our lips never said a word. Perhaps I
owed it to the vigorous indignation I felt and showed at the bad
taste of a woman foolish enough not to love my beautiful, my
glorious Calyste.

They are calling me to play a game of cards, which I do not yet
understand. I will finish my letter to-morrow. To leave you at
this moment to make a fifth at _mouche_ (that is the name of the
game) can only be done in the depths of Brittany--Adieu.

Your Sabine.

Guerande, May, 1838.

I take up my Odyssey. On the third day your children no longer
used the ceremonious "you;" they thee'd and thou'd each other like
lovers. My mother-in-law, enchanted to see us so happy, is trying
to take your place to me, dear mother, and, as often happens when
people play a part to efface other memories, she has been so
charming that she is, _almost_, you to me.

I think she has guessed the heroism of my conduct, for at the
beginning of our journey she tried to hide her anxiety with such
care that it was visible from excessive precaution.

When I saw the towers of Guerande rising in the distance, I
whispered in the ear of your son