y came from Manon. I
opened the letter and I thought I should have died of grief when I
read,--

"Be wise, and receive the news I give you calmly. The packet contains
your portrait and all the letters you have written to me. Return me my
portrait, and if you have kept my letters be kind enough to burn them. I
rely on your honour. Think of me no more. Duty bids me do all I can to
forget you, for at this hour to-morrow I shall become the wife of M.
Blondel of the Royal Academy, architect to the king. Please do not seem
as if you knew me if we chance to meet on your return to Paris."

This letter struck me dumb with astonishment, and for more than two hours
after I read it I was, as it were, bereft of my senses. I sent word to M.
d'O---- that, not feeling well, I was going to keep my room all day. When
I felt a little better I opened the packet. The first thing to fall out
was my portrait. I looked at it, and such was the perturbation of my
mind, that, though the miniature really represented me as of a cheerful
and animated expression, I thought I beheld a dreadful and a threatening
visage. I went to my desk and wrote and tore up a score of letters in
which I overwhelmed the faithless one with threats and reproaches.

I could bear no more; the forces of nature were exhausted, and I was
obliged to lie down and take a little broth, and court that sleep which
refused to come. A thousand designs came to my disordered imagination. I
rejected them one by one, only to devise new ones. I would slay this
Blondel, who had carried off a woman who was mine and mine only; who was
all but my wife. Her treachery should be punished by her losing the
object for whom she had deserted me. I accused her father, I cursed her
brother for having left me in ignorance of the insult which had so
traitorously been put upon me.

I spent the day and night in these delirious thoughts, and in the
morning, feeling worse than ever, I sent to M. d'O---- to say that I could
not possibly leave my room. Then I began to read and re-read the letters
I had written to Manon, calling upon her name in a sort of frenzy; and
again set myself to write to her without finishing a single letter. The
emptiness of my stomach and the shock I had undergone began to stupefy
me, and for a few moments I forgot my anguish only to re-awaken to acuter
pains soon after.

About three o'clock, the worthy M. d'O---- came to invite me to go with
him to the Hague, where the chief m