Oh! my Eve, you alone in my life to come!—Alas! like Louis Lambert I wish that I could give you my past. Thus, nothing that is success, fame, Parisian distractions, moves me. There is but one power that makes me accept my present life: Toil. It calms the exactions of my fiery temperament. It is because I fear myself that I am chaste.
As for this seclusion that you want, hey! I want it as much as you. It is not being a fop to tell you that since Neufchâtel three ravishing women have come to the rue Cassini, and that I did not even cast a man's glance on seeing them.
My Eve, I love you better than you love me, for I am alone in the secret of what I lose, and you know nothing of love but the sentiments of love. Besides, I love you better, for I have more reasons to love you. If I were free I would live near you, happy to be the steward of your fortune and the artisan of your wealth, as Madame Carraud's brother is for Madame d'Argout. I have a security of love, a plenitude of devotion, which you will only know with time. It needs time to fathom the infinite. To suffer the whole of life with you, taking a few rare moments of happiness, yes! To have a lifetime in two years, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years, and die, yes! Never to speak to a woman, to refuse myself to all, to live in you, oh, angel! but that is my thought at all hours. The ... which I told you about Madame P... was because she had vexed you, and before your suffering I became besotted, as you before mine.
Mon Dieu! if we lived together, if I had twenty ducats a month, to you should belong my poems. I would write books, and read them to you, and we would burn them in our fire. My adored minette, I weep sometimes in thinking that I sell my ideas, that people read me! Ah! you do not know what I could be if, free for one evening, I could speak to you, see you, caress you by my thoughts and by myself. Oh! you would then know that your thoughts of purity, of exclusive tenderness are mine. Angel of my life, I live in you, for you, by you. Only, if I am mistaken, tell me so without anger. There is never any false or bad intention in me. I obey my heart in all that is sentiment. I have never known what a calculation is. If I mistake, it is in good faith.
My love, let us never separate. In six months I shall be free. Well, then, no power on earth can disunite us. La dilecta was forty-six when I was twenty-two. Why talk about your forty years? We have thirty years before us. Do you think that at sixty-four a man betrays thirty years' affection?
What! you think that the opera, the salons, fame can distract me from you? Then you don't know how I love you. I shall be more angry at that than you at Madame P... No, believe me, I love you as a woman loves and as a man loves. In my life to come there is nothing but you and work. My dear gift, my dear star, my sweet spirit, let yourself be caressed by hope, and say to yourself that I am not amorous or passionate; all that passes. I love you, I adore you in æternum. I believe in you as I do in myself. Mon Dieu! I would like to know words which could infuse into you my soul and my thought, which could tell you that you are in my heart, in my blood, in my brain, in my thought,—in short, the life of my life; that each beating of my heart gives birth to a desire full of thee. Oh! you do not know what are three years of chastity, which spring at every moment to the heart and make it bound, to the head and make it palpitate. If I were not sober and did not work, this purity would drive me mad. I alone am in the secret of the terrible emotions which the emanations from your dear person give me. It is an unspeakable delirium which, by turns, freezes my nature by the omnipotence of desire, and makes me burn. I resist follies like those of the young seigneur cut down by the Elector.
We have, both of us, our sufferings; do not let us dispute that. Let us love each other, and do not refuse me that which makes all accepted. In other respects, in all things, angel, I am submissive to you as to God. Take my life, ask me to die, order me all things, except not to love you, not to desire you, not to possess you. Outside of that all is possible to me in your name.
[1] Madame de Berny is meant, and the invention of this letter is infamous. See letter to Madame Carraud in Appendix, written at the same time as this spurious letter.—TR