"Friend of my heart, jessamine of my soul, bright party-coloured tulip of my souvenirs, may the Creator pour upon your gray and venerable head a stream from his flower-pot of blessings!
"Dear Friend,—Several atrocious doctors, with pale noses, the very sight of which gives one the cholic, and with black searching eyes, that make one tremble, say that I am very ill,—that I shall die. They say too that there is only one mode of cure, and that is to take my valuable body into your beautiful province. It is the east wind they say, and blue-bottles, corn-flowers, field-poppies, and the green turf; the song of the nightingale and the beautiful moonlight nights; the hum of bees and the bleating of sheep, which will effect this marvellous cure. It is amongst the rocks and streams of your mountains, in long walks in your forests, and in your valleys; in the innocent candour of your pretty peasant girls, the pure water of your fountains, and the cream cheeses of your dairies that I am told resides the power to retain here below my soul, just ready to fly away. Alas! yes, I am forced to admit the fact; I must say I am very ill, and it is my own fault;—yes, my own undoubted fault. I have drank too deeply of voluptuous ease; I have tasted too often the luscious grapes of forbidden pleasures. I am no longer virtuous enough to wish to see the sun rise, and hence it is that I am suffering intensely in the capacity of a human pincushion, in which, one after the other, the sharpest and most pointed pins have stuck themselves, namely, every infirmity and every disease that mortal man is heir to.
"In this delicate and distressing position, dear friend, I thought of you: yes, to you, to you only, shall I owe my restoration to health. Do not therefore be surprised if, in the course of a few days, you should see my shadow approach your hospitable door; and prepare for it, I beg you, a small room and a bed of dried leaves, coarse bread, and a jug of water. It seems that in order to regenerate my blood I shall want all these; and I shall be fortunate if, in seeking a perfect restoration to health, I am not obliged to be a swine-herd or keep sheep, to dig, cut, and saw wood, pick spinach, or weed the flower-beds! Quick, my friend; light with all convenient haste the altar on which we will burn again the incense and benjamin of friendship. Blow again the sparks now so nearly extinguished of our happy boyish days; revive again the holy flames of our youthful affections; and, above all things, have the scissors ready which are to cut the Gordian knot of my complicated diseases. Soon, in shaking you by the hand, my shadow shall say much more."
Yours, &c.,
Fifteen days after the receipt of this extraordinary composition, the banker, escorted by a lean and cadaverous-looking doctor, arrived at our château, half strangled with a churchyard cough, and in a state of apparently hopeless debility. He was evidently very, very ill; and if it had not been for the sincere friendship my father had for him, I really do not know how we could have supported the dark cloud which his presence seemed to throw upon our house for nearly nine mortal weeks.
No one dared either to move or speak: if you wished to laugh, it could only be on the terrace; if to blow your nose, it was to be done in the cellar; and as to sneezing, one was obliged to go to the bottom of the garden. The horses' feet were wrapped up in hay-bands, so that no sound should be heard in the court-yard; the servants went about the house in list shoes, and all the approaches to it were knee-deep in straw. There was an end to the fanfares of the huntsman's horn, and the rollicking chorus; guns, shot and powder, were all placed under lock and key; the kennel was mute, and the muzzled dogs looked piteously at one another, and hung their heads, as if they had given themselves up to the certain prospect of being drowned. The very hares knew how matters were, and passed to and fro before the garden-windows; and a stray wolf, which came one evening into the court-yard, sat on his hind-quarters and looked us impudently in the face; as to the birds, they ate up very nearly every peach and apricot we had. The silence of the grave reigned everywhere—the house seemed a very sepulchre, in which nothing could be heard but the monotonous liquid bubblings of the fountains, the ticking of the clocks, and the sighing breezes that whistled through the casements.
Fairly worn out with this state of things, I was thinking seriously of leaving for the gay swamps of Holland, when a crisis occurred in the banker's disorder, and after a severe struggle, in which every bone of his body seemed to twist itself round, he was declared by his pallid doctor out of danger—saved. Surrounding his bed, we drank with no little joy to his perfect recovery, and during one entire week we suspended on the walls of his bed-room, according to the custom in Le Morvan, garlands of lilies and vervenia, interwoven with green foliage and wild thyme. From this time he improved daily, and three months after no one would have recognized the sick man; his face became quite rosy, and his eyes looked full of returning health. With a gun on his shoulder, he followed us nimbly through the vineyards, never flinched from his bottle, sang barcarolles with the ladies, made declarations of love to all the young girls, promised to marry each, once at least, and danced away in the evening under the acacias with the nymphs of the village, to whom he had always some secret to tell behind the trees, or in some snug little corner. The woodcock season having arrived during his stay, which was now nearly over, we determined that he should be introduced to la chasse aux Mares.
Pardon me, kind reader, for all this gossip by the way, but this is the point at which I wished to arrive.