Well, my dear friend, I will answer you very briefly, I am in love! Yes, I am in love! These words are a reply, I think, to everything; although I must own that fear of the commissary, which certainly does threaten my felicity, has considerably humbled my Oriental pride—I am in love! I have burnt my essay for the Academy.
Well, then, I have abjured my polygamy. What more can I say to you?
To-day I must confide to you a most valuable discovery I have made; for I beg you to believe that love is not, as so many foolish people imagine, an extinguisher to the fire of the human intellect. On the contrary, it stimulates the perceptions; and an enthusiastic lover, who is familiar with the elements of science, can extend therein his field of observations quite as easily as persons whose hearts are whole.
As an example of this, then, I have just been realising the beauty of a charming phenomenon of nature—a most ordinary one, and yet one which so far has remained, I think, completely unobserved. I refer to the spring!
As a great artist, you of course know, as well as any one in the world, that this is the season which leads from the winter to the summer; but what I feel sure you don't know is the full charm of this transitory period, in which the whole forest awakens, in which the bushes sprout, and the young birds twitter in their nests!
According to Vauvenargues, "The first days of spring possess less charm than the growing virtue of a young man."
Well, it would ill befit me to depreciate the value of such an axiom, coming from the pen of such a great philosopher; still, and without wishing to disdain his politeness in so far as it is really flattering to myself at this particular moment of my career, I do not hesitate to raise my voice after his, and assert, without any pretence of modesty, that this charm is at least as great in the case of Flora's lover as in mine, and that it is only fair to accord to each his just portion. If my budding virtue possesses ineffable charms, no less powerful are those of the lilacs and the roses. It is really, I assure you, a wonderful spectacle. You ought to have witnessed it! Some day I will tell you all about it, as I have just been doing to my uncle, who finds it all very curious, although he professes only to understand me "very approximately."
Getting up at sunrise, Kondjé and I take a run through the coppices, her little feet all wet with the dew. We feel free, merry, and careless, dismissing the commissary to oblivion, and trusting to each other's love, the full charms of which this solitary companionship has revealed to us. I do not risk more than two excursions to Paris each week, one to my aunt Eudoxia's, and one to my aunt Van Cloth's. Having made these angel's visits, and performed various family duties, I vanish, by day or by night as the case may be, eluding the vigilance of the spies who have no doubt been set at my heels by the unscrupulous mother, or by that rascal Kiusko, as we now call him. These adventures augment my rapturous felicity; and if time and destiny have shorn me of the privilege of my sultanship, which you say rendered me so proud and vain, I retain at all events the glory of being happy.
I am in love, my dear fellow; and therefore I dream and forget. But there is another still darker speck on my serene sky. Anna Campbell is just approaching her eighteenth birthday, and I cannot think of this without a good deal of melancholy. Although my uncle is delighted to take occasional walks here, at the end of which he finds a capital glass of madeira waiting for him, he, as you are aware, is not a person of romantic temperament, and has already noted with his scrutinising eye the ravages caused by a double passion, which bodes no good for his daughter's married life.
The other night, on my return from my aunt Van Cloth's, he questioned me very seriously on the subject. As to my disappointing his hopes, he knows that the idea of such a thing would not even occur to me. That is a matter of honour between us.