Good-morning, my soul, my joy, my life. How are your adored eyes, my Toto? I cannot refrain from asking, because it interests me to hear, more than anything in the world. I am always thinking about them. I long for the 15th of this month, for then I shall have the right to insist upon your resting, and I shall certainly exercise it. My dear love, what joy it will be for me to feel your dear head leaning against mine, to kiss your beautiful eyes, and to make certain that you do not work. The weather is lovely this morning. It carries my thoughts back to our dear little annual trip, when we were so happy and so cosy together. We are not to have that felicity this year, and really I do not know how I shall endure it when the time comes at which we used to start. It will be very hard and difficult, and I doubt whether my courage and reason will suffice to enable me to bear the greatest sacrifice I have ever made in my life. My dear one, it will be sad indeed; I wonder whether I shall be equal to it.
I love you, adore you, admire you, and again I love and adore you.
Juliette.
Tuesday, 7.45 p.m., April 10th, 1838.
My love, I am writing to you with joy and worship in my heart. You were so kind and tender and fascinating to me to-day that I seemed to feel again the savour and rapture of the days of old. My Toto, my adored one, fancy if your love were to flower again like some brilliant, sweet-scented spring blossom! With what ecstasy and reverence I would preserve it fresh and rosy in my breast. Poor beloved, your work has done to our idyll what the winter does to the trees and flowers—the sap has retired deep into the bottom of your heart, and often I have feared it was quite dead; but now I see it was not: it was only lulled to sleep and I shall possess my Toto once more, beautiful, blooming, and perfumed as in those glorious days of our first love.
I who am not a sensitive plant of the sun like you, have yet come better through the trial, and if I bear no blossom, I have at least the advantage of preserving my leaves ever green and alive; that is to say, I have never ceased to love and adore you. Indeed that is true, my own, I love you as much as the first day.
Juliette.
Sunday, 11 a.m., April 22nd, 1838.
You see, darling, by the dimensions of my paper, that I am preparing to go and applaud my Marion this evening. I will not reproach you for not having come this morning. In fact, in future I shall not allude to it again, for nothing is more unsuitable or ridiculous than the solicitations of a woman who vainly appeals for the favours of her lover. Therefore, beloved, as I am to live with you as a sister with a brother, you will approve of my refraining from reminding you in any way of the time when we were husband and wife.
It is still very cold, my maid says; although the sun is shining in at my windows, it has left its warmth in the sky. It resembles the fine phrases of a suitor who no longer loves; his words may be the same, his expressions as tender, his language as impassioned, but love is lacking and those words which scintillate as the sun upon my windows, fail to warm the heart of the poor woman who had dreamt of love eternal.