From, the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Hôtel des Roches Noires, Trouville, France, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, Luton, Bedfordshire, England.
Poor flower, in your box of wet moss, what has become of you? Are you dead, and dried in your wife's hortus siccus? She would be quite sure of you then, and I dare say much happier than if you were set forth in anybody else's bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that "perfectly proper" milieu (is not that correct English, "perfectly proper"?). Will you be dreadfully changed when one sees you again? There is a French proverb which says that "the years of joy count double." The days of ennui certainly count for years, and give us gray hairs before we are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You would marry an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her tea. I told you beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once shut up in the country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What people!—to put him in prison for a little bit of chiasso like that! You should never have taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that doleful and damp land of precisians. What will they do with him? And what can you do without him? The weather here is admirable. There are numbers of people one knows. It is really very amusing. I go and dance every night, and then we play,—usually "bac," or roulette. Everybody is very merry. We all talk often of you, and say the De Profundis over you, my poor Piero. Why did your cruel destiny make you see a Sainte-Nitouche drinking tea under a lime-tree? I suppose Sainte-Nitouche would not permit it, else why not exchange the humid greenness of your matrimonial prison for the Rue des Planches and the Casino?
From the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Trouville.
Carissima mia,—
I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared that if I do not go out of this watery atmosphere and verdant Bastile I shall perish of sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration was for the moment such that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was going to get into a passion. It would have been so refreshing! After twenty-six days of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have been positively delightful to have had a storm. But no! For an instant she looked at me with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove's eyes filled, she sighed, she left the room! Do they not say that feather beds offer an admirable defence against bullets? I feel like the bullet which has been fired into the feather bed. The feather bed is victorious. I see the Rue des Planches through the perspective of the watery atmosphere; the Casino seems to smile at me from the end of the interminable lime-tree avenue, which is one of the chief beauties of this house; but, alas! they are both as far off as if Trouville were in the moon. What could they do to me if I came alone? Do you know what they could do? I have not the remotest idea, but I imagine something frightful. They shut up their public-houses by force, and their dancing-places. Perhaps they would shut up me. In England they have a great belief in creating virtue by Act of Parliament. In myself this enforced virtue creates such a revolt that I shall tirer sur le mors, and fly before very long. The admired excellence of this beautiful estate is that it lies in a ring-fence. I feel that I shall take a leap over that ring-fence. Do not mistake me, cara mia Teresina, I am exceedingly fond of my wife. I think her quite lovely, simple, saintly, and truly woman-like. She is exquisitely pretty, and entirely without vanity, and I am certain she is immeasurably my superior morally, and possibly mentally too. But—there is always such a long and melancholy "but" attached to marriage—she does not amuse me in the least. She is always the same. She is shocked at nearly everything that is natural or diverting. She thinks me unmanly because I dislike rain. She buttons about her a hideous, straight, water-proof garment, and walks out in a deluge. She blushes if I try to make her laugh at "Figaro," and she goes out of the room when I mention Trouville. What am I to do with a woman like this? It is an admirable type, no doubt. Possibly, if she had not shut me up in a country house in a wet June, with the thermometer at 10° R., and the barometer fixedly at the word Rainy, I might have been always charmed with this St. Dorothea-like attitude and never have found out the monotony of it. But, as it is, I yawn till I dislocate my neck. She thinks me a heathen already. I am convinced that very soon she will think me a brute. And I am neither. I only want to get out, like the bird in the cage. It is a worn simile, but it is such a true one.
From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Roches Noires, Trouville, to the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset.
Piero mio,—