From the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg, to the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset.
'My poor little Dear,—Are you already beginning to be miserable about what people will think? Then, indeed, your days of joy are numbered. If I were to write to you fifty times I could only repeat what I have always written. You are not wise, and you are doing everything you ought not to do. Of two people who are married, there is always one who has the delusion that he or she is necessary and delightful to the life of the other. The other generally thinks just the contrary. The result is not peace. This gay, charming, handsome son of Rome has become your entire world, but don't suppose for a moment, my child, that you will ever be his. It is not in reason, not in Nature, that you should be. If you have the intelligence, the tact, and the forbearance required, you may become his friend and counsellor, but I fear you never will have these. You fret, you weep, and you understand nothing of the masculine temperament. "I see snakes," as the Americans observe; and you will not have either the coolness or the wisdom required to scotch a snake, much less to kill it. Once for all, my poor pet, go cheerfully to Paris, Trouville, and all the pleasure places in the world. Affect enjoyment if you feel it not, and try to remember, beyond everything, that affection is not to be retained or revived by either coercion or lamentation. Once dead, it is not to be awakened by all the "crooning" of its mourner. It is a corpse, for ever and aye. Myself, I fail to see how you could expect a young Italian, who has all the habits of the great world, and the memories of his vie de garçon, to be cheerful or contented in a wet June in an isolated English country house, with nobody to look at but yourself. Believe me, my dear child, it is the inordinate vanity of a woman which makes her imagine that she can be sufficient for her husband. Nothing but vanity. The cleverer a woman is, the more fully she recognises her own insufficiency for the amusement of a man, and the more carefully (if she be wise) does she take care that this deficiency in her shall never be forced upon his observation. Now, if you shut a man up with you in a country house, with the rain raining every day, as in Longfellow's poem, you do force it upon him most conspicuously. If you were not his wife, I daresay he would not tire of you, and he might even prefer a grey sky to a blue one. But as his wife!—oh, my dear, why, why don't you try and understand what a terrible penalty-weight you carry in the race? Write and tell me all about it. I shall be anxious. I am so afraid, my sweet little sister, that you think love is all moonlight and kisses, and forget that there are clouds in the sky and quarrels on earth. May Heaven save you from both. P.S.—Do remember that this same love requires just as delicate handling as a cobweb does. If a rough touch break the cobweb, all the artists in the world can't mend it. There is a wholesome truth for you. If you prevent his going to Paris now, he will go in six months' time, and perhaps, then, he will go without you. You are not wise, my poor pet; you should make him feel that you sympathise with his pleasures, not that you and his pleasures are enemies. But it is no use to instil wisdom into you; you are very young, and very much in love. You look on all the natural distractions which he inclines to, as on so many rivals. So they may be, but we don't beat our rivals by abusing them. The really wise way is to tacitly show that we can be more attractive than they; if we cannot be so, we may sulk or sigh as we will, we shall be vanquished by them. You will think me very preachy-preachy, and, perhaps, you will throw me in the fire unread; but I must say just one word more. Dear, you are in love with Love, but underneath Love there is a real man, and real men are far from ideal creatures. Now, it is the real man that you want to consider, to humour, to study. If the real man be pleased, Love will take care of himself; whereas if you bore the real man, Love will fly away. If you had been wise, my poor pet, I repeat, you would have found nothing so delightful as Gyp and Octave de Mirbeau, and you would have declared that the Paris asphalte excelled all the English lawns in the world. He does not love you the less because he wants to be dans le mouvement, to hear what other men are saying, and to smoke his cigar amongst his fellow-creatures.'
From the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Hotel des Roches Noires, Trouville, France, to the Principe di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, Luton, Beds., 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 daresay much happier than if you were set forth in anybody else's bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that "perfectly proper" atmosphere (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 grey 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 Principe 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 get out of this damp 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 womanlike. 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, waterproof 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 S. 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!'