Juliette.
Jersey,
Thursday, 5 p.m., July 7th, 1853.
Whatever you may say, my sweet one, to retard the gradual cessation of my daily yarns, you cannot stay the progress of the natural law, even when assisted by my passive submission to your will. Why continue this custom of writing to you twice a day, when the pretext for doing so has faded from our joint lives? If I were a woman of parts, I could substitute imagination and shrewd observation for love-making; but as these are entirely lacking in me, I have nothing to record in those bulletins where kisses and caresses once occupied the chief place. Now, when I have said good morning and alluded to the state of the weather, I have nothing more to say, because I am stupid. Your influence alone can extract what is in my heart. For this reason, my dear one, these scribbles became blank and aimless, from the moment the happiness that once dictated them began to die away and degenerate into a friendship despoiled of all pleasure and voluptuousness. I do not reproach you, my adored one, any more than I reproach myself for not being still the woman you loved beyond everything—still it might be better to discontinue this daily record of the change, and to give up the piteous babblings which no longer have even the excuse of wit.
Juliette.
Jersey,
Saturday, 2.30 p.m., September 24th.
How one’s brain scintillates from living for ever within four walls! What sparkling and varied incidents one experiences in this existence of a squirrel in a cage! For my part I am so inspired by it that I hardly know where to commence. Let us, therefore, proceed in due sequence; my cat, which has been slumbering for the last two hours on its right ear, has just turned over on to its left.
Père Nicotte, abandoning the ploughshare, announces for Thursday, September 29th, the sale by auction of three fat hogs, a sow with her eight sucking pigs, three yearling bulls, another rising two, and other items too numerous and too peculiar to enumerate.
Births: August 5th. Blanche Laura, daughter of Mr. Harper Richard Hugo.
The annual dinner of the Society will take place on the above-mentioned day. Those intending to be present, and those proposing to furnish fruit for the same, are urgently requested to send in their names on or before the preceding Saturday.
What more do you want? Eleven pigs, not including the sow, three yearling bulls, not including the one rising two, a daughter of your own, and permission to invite yourself to a dinner of the Society, and even to furnish the fruit for it. If all this does not attract you and stir the very marrow of your bones, and tempt your appetite, you must be dead to the promptings of sensibility, paternity, and sensuality. In that case, go to bed and to sleep, and leave me to myself—the more so, as I do not happen to possess an accommodating table,[108] to furnish me with ready-made apparitions. Remember, I have to be my own Dante, Æsop, and Shakspere, whereas you catch the dead fish that the spirits of the other world attach to your lines—a proceeding practised in the Mediterranean long before those tittle-tattling tables were thought of. Pray accept my most tender sentiments.