t rascally Jesuit!

HE?

My dear friend, you cannot understand it by any possible means, you say,
and I perfectly believe you. You think I am going mad? It may be so, but
not for the reasons which you suppose.

Yes, I am going to get married, and I will give you what has led me to
take that step.

My ideas and my convictions have not changed at all. I look upon all
legalized cohabitation as utterly stupid, for I am certain that nine
husbands out of ten are cuckolds; and they get no more than their
deserts for having been idiotic enough to fetter their lives, and
renounce their freedom in love, the only happy and good thing in the
world, and for having clipped the wings of fancy, which continually
drives us on towards all women, &c., &c., &c. You know what I mean. More
than ever I feel that I am incapable of loving one woman alone, because
I shall always adore all the others too much. I should like to have a
thousand arms, a thousand mouths, and a thousand--_temperaments_, to be
able to strain an army of these charming creatures in my embrace at the
same moment.

And yet I am going to get married!

I may add that I know very little of the girl who is going to become my
wife to-morrow; I have only seen her four or five times. I know that
there is nothing unpleasing about her, and that is enough for my
purpose. She is small, fair, and stout; so of course the day after
to-morrow I shall ardently wish for a tall, dark, thin woman.

She is not rich, and belongs to the middle-classes. She is a girl such
as you may find by the gross, well adapted for matrimony, without any
apparent faults, and with no particularly striking qualities. People say
of her:

"Mlle. Lajolle is a very nice girl," and to-morrow they will say: "What
a very nice woman Madame Raymon is." She belongs, in a word, to that
immense number of girls whom one is glad to have for one's wife till the
moment comes, when one discovers that one happens to prefer all the
other women to that particular woman whom one has married.

"Well," you will say to me, "what on earth did you get married for?"

I hardly like to tell you the strange and seemingly improbable reason
that urged me on to this senseless act; the fact, however, is that I am
frightened of being alone!

I don't know how to tell you or to make you understand me, but my state
of mind is so wretched that you will pity me and despise me.

I do not want to be alone any longer at night; I w