ris, only to
be known by its innumerable lights. And then I said to myself,

"No, I cannot be an actress; I cannot resign my real self for that
vamped-up hypocrite before the lamps. Out on those stage-robes and
painted cheeks! Out on that simulated utterance of sentiments learned by
rote and practised before the looking-glass till every gesture has its
drill!"

Then I gazed on those stars which provoke our questionings, and return
no answer, till my heart grew full,--so full,--and I bowed my head and
wept like a child.

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

And still no letter from you! I see in the journals that you have left
Nice. Is it that you are too absorbed in your work to have leisure to
write to me? I know you are not ill, for if you were, all Paris would
know of it. All Europe has an interest in your health. Positively I will
write to you no more till a word from yourself bids me do so.

I fear I must give up my solitary walks in the Bois de Boulogne: they
were very dear to me, partly because the quiet path to which I confined
myself was that to which you directed me as the one you habitually
selected when at Paris, and in which you had brooded over and revolved
the loveliest of your romances; and partly because it was there that,
catching, alas! not inspiration but enthusiasm from the genius that had
hallowed the place, and dreaming I might originate music, I nursed my
own aspirations and murmured my own airs. And though so close to
that world of Paris to which all artists must appeal for judgment or
audience, the spot was so undisturbed, so sequestered. But of late that
path has lost its solitude, and therefore its charm.

Six days ago the first person I encountered in my walk was a man whom
I did not then heed. He seemed in thought, or rather in revery, like
myself; we passed each other twice or thrice, and I did not notice
whether he was young or old, tall or short; but he came the next day,
and a third day, and then I saw that he was young, and, in so regarding
him, his eyes became fixed on mine. The fourth day he did not come, but
two other men came, and the look of one was inquisitive and offensive.
They sat themselves down on a bench in the walk, and though I did not
seem to notice them, I hastened home; and the next day, in talking with
our kind Madame Savarin, and alluding to these quiet walks of mine, she
hinted, with the delicacy which is her characteristic, that the customs
of Paris did not allow d