From Naples you will go to Rome, where you will spend a month persuading yourself that it is useless to try to see it all, because you shall return there in the future. Then you will go to Florence, and remain there ten days. After that you will do what you like. When you come to Paris, you will find the book for M. Buonuicci and my final instructions. At that time I shall probably be at Arles or at Orange. If you should stop there, be sure and inquire for me, and I will show you an ancient theatre, which will not interest you especially.
You promised me something in return for my Turkish mirror. I rely implicitly on your memory. Ah, I have great news for you! The first of the forty Academicians to die will occasion me to make thirty-nine calls. Of course I shall be as awkward as possible, and no doubt I shall make thirty-nine enemies. It would take too long to explain the reasons for this attack of ambition. Enough that the Academy is now the goal of my aspirations.
Good-bye. I will write again before leaving. Be happy, but bear in mind this maxim, that one should never do foolish things unless they please you. Perhaps the precept of M. de Talleyrand is more to your taste, that one should beware of first impulses, because they are usually honest.
XVII
Paris, June 22, 1842.
Your letter has been tardy in coming, and I became impatient. I must reply at once to the principal points. First, I received your purse. It exhaled a most aristocratic perfume, and is very pretty. If you embroidered it yourself, it does you credit. But I have recognised in it your newly acquired taste for the practical: in the first place, it is a purse to hold money; next, you valued it at a hundred francs at the stage-coach. It would have been more poetical to declare that it was worth one or two stars. All the same, I prize it quite as highly. I will put my medals in it. I should have cared more for it if you had condescended to put in it a few lines from your fair hand.
Secondly, I do not care for your pheasants. You offer them in a disagreeable fashion, and, besides, you say unpleasant things to me about my Turkish conserves. It is you who have the taste of a heretic, if you are unable to appreciate what the houris eat.
I believe I have answered everything that was sensible in your letter. I will not quarrel about the rest. I abandon you to your own conscience, which, I am sure, is sometimes even more severe than I, whom you accuse of harshness and indifference. The hypocrisy which you practise so well in sport, will play you a trick some day—that is, it will become natural to you. As for coquetry, the inseparable companion of the horrid vice which you extol, you have always indulged in it. It became you very well when it was softened by frankness, warm-heartedness, and imagination, but now—now, what shall I say?
You have beautiful raven hair, a lovely blue cashmere, and you are always charming when you wish to be. Say that I do not spoil you! As for that essence of which you speak, it is your own kindness which you thus designate. I like that word essence; yes, the real essence of roses, which is always frozen like that of Adrianople. I will tell you this Oriental story.
There was once a dervish who seemed to a baker to be a saint. The baker one day promised to give him white bread the rest of his life. At this the dervish was enchanted. But after awhile the baker said to him, “We agreed on brown bread, did we not? I have first-class brown bread. It is my specialty, is brown bread.” The dervish replied, “I have already more brown bread than I can eat, but——”