send this letter by courier, so that you may have
time to follow the advice I now give you.

I made Lecuyer talk. I disentangled from his lies, his language,
and his reticence, the threads I lacked to bring to light the
whole plot of the domestic conspiracy hatched against you. This
evening, at the Spanish embassy, I shall offer my admiring
compliments to your mother-in-law and your wife. I shall pay
court to Madame Evangelista; I intend to desert you basely, and
say sly things to your discredit,--nothing openly, or that
Mascarille in petticoats would detect my purpose. How did you make
her such an enemy? That is what I want to know. If you had had the
wit to be in love with that woman before you married her daughter,
you would to-day be peer of France, Duc de Manerville, and,
possibly, ambassador to Madrid.

If you had come to me at the time of your marriage, I would have
helped you to analyze and know the women to whom you were binding
yourself; out of our mutual observations safety might have been
yours. But, instead of that, these women judged me, became afraid
of me, and separated us. If you had not stupidly given in to them
and turned me the cold shoulder, they would never have been able
to ruin you. Your wife brought on the coldness between us,
instigated by her mother, to whom she wrote two letters a week,--a
fact to which you paid no attention. I recognized my Paul when I
heard that detail.

Within a month I shall be so intimate with your mother-in-law that
I shall hear from her the reasons of the hispano-italiano hatred
which she feels for you,--for you, one of the best and kindest men
on earth! Did she hate you before her daughter fell in love with
Felix de Vandenesse; that's a question in my mind. If I had not
taken a fancy to go to the East with Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and
a few other good fellows of your acquaintance, I should have been
in a position to tell you something about that affair, which was
beginning just as I left Paris. I saw the first gleams even then
of your misfortune. But what gentleman is base enough to open such
a subject unless appealed to? Who shall dare to injure a woman, or
break that illusive mirror in which his friend delights in gazing
at the fairy scenes of a happy marriage? Illusions are the riches
of the heart.

Your wife, dear friend, is, I believe I may say, in the fullest
application of the