XXIV.
EDGAR DE MEILHAN
to
MADAME GUERIN,
Pont de l'Arche (Eure).
RICHEPORT, July 10th 18—.
Three times have I been to the post-office since you left the château in such an abrupt and inexplicable manner. I am lost in conjecture about your sudden departure, which was both unnecessary and unprepared. It is doubtless because you do not wish to tell me the reason that you refuse to see me. I know that you are still at Pont de l'Arche, and that you have never left Madame Taverneau's house. So that when she tells me in a measured and mysterious tone that you have been absent for some time; looking at the closed door of your room, behind which I divine your presence, I am seized with an insane desire to kick down the narrow plank which separates me from you. Fits of gloomy passion possess me which illogical obstacles and unjust resistance always excite.
What have I done? What can you have against me? Let me at least know the crime for which I am punished. On the scaffold they always read the victim his sentence, equitable or otherwise. Will you be more cruel than a hangman? Read me my sentence. Nothing is more frightful than to be executed in a dungeon without knowing for what offence.
For three days—three eternities—I have taxed my memory to an alarming extent. I have recalled everything that I have said for the last two weeks, word by word, syllable for syllable, endeavoring to give to each expression its intonation, its inflection, its sharps and flats. Every different signification that the music of the voice could give to a thought, I have analyzed, debated, commented upon twenty times a day. Not a word, accent nor gesture has enlightened me. I defy the most embittered and envious spirit to find anything that could offend the most susceptible pride, the haughtiest majesty. Nothing has occurred in my familiar intercourse with you that would alarm a sensitive plant or a mimosa. Therefore, such cannot be the motive for your panic-stricken flight. I am young, ardent, impetuous; I attach no importance to certain social conventionalities, but I feel confident that I have never failed in a religious respect for the holiness of love and modesty. I love you—I could never, wilfully, have offended you. How could my eyes and lips have expressed what was neither in my head nor in my heart? If there is no fire without smoke, as a natural consequence there can be no smoke without fire!
It is not that—Is it caprice or coquetry? Your mind is too serious and your soul too honest for such an act; and besides, what would be your object? Such feline cruelties may suit blasé women of the world who are roused by the sight of moral torture; who give, in the invisible sphere of the passions, feasts of the Roman empresses, where beating hearts are torn by the claws of the wild beasts of the soul, unbridled desires, insatiate hate and maddened jealousy, all the hideous pack of bad passions. Louise, you have not wished to play such a game with me. It would be unavailing and dangerous.