sand thanks and blessings! With you happiness entered
into my destiny. You were the dawn announcing a glorious sunrise, the
prelude to the melodies which, since yesterday, swell in my bosom. If I
take pleasure in recognising your gentle influence in the secret delight
that pervades my being, do not deprive me of the illusion. I believe,
with my mother, in mysterious influences. I believe that, as there are
miserable beings who, unwittingly, drag misfortune after them and sow it
over their pathway, there are others, on the other hand, who, marked by
the finger of God, bear happiness to all whom they meet. Happy the
wanderer who, like me, sees one of those privileged beings cross his
path! Their presence, alone, brings down blessings from heaven and the
earth blossoms under their footsteps.

And really, madame, you do possess the faculty of dissipating fatal
enchantments. Like the morning star, which disperses the mighty
gatherings of goblins and gnomes, you have shone upon my horizon and
Lady Penock has vanished like a shadow. Thanks to you, I crossed France
with impunity from the borders of Isere to the borders of the Creuse,
and then to the banks of the Seine, without encountering the implacable
islander who pursued me from the fields of Latium to the foot of the
Grande Chartreuse. I must not forget to state that at Voreppe, where I
stopped to change horses, the keeper of the ruined inn, recognising my
carriage, politely presented me with a bill for damages; so much for a
broken glass, so much for a door beaten in, so much for a shattered
ladder. I commend to M. de Braimes this brilliant stroke of one of his
constituents; it is an incident forgotten by Cervantes in the history of
his hero.

In spite of my character of knight-errant, I reached my dear mountains
without any other adventure. I had not visited them for three years, and
the sight of their rugged tops rejoiced my heart. You would like the
country; it is poor, but poetic. You would enjoy its green solitudes,
its uncultivated fields, its silent valleys and little lakes enshrined
like sheets of crystal in borders of sage and heather. Its chief charm
to me is its obscurity; no curiosity-hunter or ordinary tourist has ever
frightened away the dryads from its chestnut groves or the naiads from
its fresh streams. Even a flitting poet has scarcely ever betrayed its
rural mysteries. My chateau has none of the grandeur that you have,
perhaps, ascribed to it. Picture