Doubtless, my dear D'Albert, you are greatly surprised by what I now do after what I have done.—I permit you to be, there is good reason for it.—I will wager that you have already applied to me at least twenty of the epithets we agreed to strike out of our vocabulary: perfidious, inconstant, vile creature—is it not so?—At all events, you will not call me cruel or virtuous, which is so much gained.—You curse me and you are wrong.—You desired me, you loved me, I was your ideal:—very good. I granted you on the spot what you wanted; it was nobody's fault but your own that you hadn't it sooner. I served as body to your dream in the most accommodating way.—I gave you what I certainly shall never again give any one—a surprise upon which you hardly reckoned and for which you certainly ought to be most grateful to me.—Now that I have satisfied you, it pleases me to go away.—What is there so monstrous in that?
You had me absolutely and without reserve a whole night; what more do you want? Another night and then still another; you would even put up with a few days at need.—And so you would go on until you were disgusted with me.—I can hear you from here crying most politely that I am not one of those with whom men become disgusted. Mon Dieu! yes, with me as with others.
It would last six months, two years, even ten years, if you choose, but it must end at some time or other.—You would keep me through a sort of feeling of duty, or because you had not the courage to give me my dismissal. What is the use of waiting until it comes to that?
And then perhaps I should be the one to cease to love you. I have found you charming; perhaps, by virtue of seeing you often, I should have found you detestable.—Forgive that supposition.—By living with you on terms of close intimacy, I should have occasion, I doubt not, to see you in a cotton night-cap or in some absurd or grotesque domestic situation.—You would necessarily have lost the romantic and mysterious side that charms me above all things, and your character, being better understood, would no longer have seemed so unique to me. I should be less engrossed with you, having you near me, just as it happens with books that one never opens because one has them in his library.—Your nose or your mind would no longer seem to me nearly as well turned; I should notice that your coat didn't fit you, or that your stockings weren't drawn tight; I should have a thousand disillusionments of that sort which would have made me very unhappy, and I should have come at last to this conclusion!—that you certainly had neither heart nor soul, and that I was destined not to be understood in the matter of love.
You adore me and I reciprocate the feeling. You have not the slightest reason to reproach me, and I have not the slightest complaint to make of you. I have been perfectly faithful to you throughout our whole liaison. I have deceived you in nothing.—I had neither a false bosom nor false virtue; you had the extreme kindness to tell me that I was even more beautiful than you imagined.—In return for the beauty I gave you, you gave me much pleasure; we are quits;—I go my way and you yours, and perhaps we shall meet again at the Antipodes.—Live in that hope.
You think perhaps that I do not love because I leave you. Later you will realize how far that is true.—If I had cared less for you, I would have remained and poured out the insipid draught for you to the dregs. Your love would soon have been dead of ennui; after some time you would have entirely forgotten me, and as you read my name on the list of your conquests, you would have asked yourself: "Who the devil was she?"—I have at least the satisfaction of thinking that you will remember me more than some others.—Your unsatisfied desire will still spread its wings to fly to me; I shall always be to you something desirable to which your fancy will love to return, and I hope that in the bed of the mistresses you may have hereafter, you will think sometimes of the single night you passed with me.
You will never be more lovable than you were on that blessed evening, and even if you should be as much so, that would show a falling-off; for in love, as in poetry, to remain at the same point is to retrograde. Cling to that impression—you will do well.
You have made the task of such lovers as I may have—if I have other lovers—a difficult one, and no one will ever be able to efface my memory of you;—they will be the heirs of Alexander.
If it grieves you too deeply to lose me, burn this letter, which is the only proof that you have had me, and you will think you have had a pleasant dream. What is there to prevent that? The vision vanished before dawn, just at the hour when dreams return home through the doors of horn or ivory.—How many men have died, less fortunate than you, without giving so much as a single kiss to their chimera!
I am neither whimsical nor mad nor prudish.—What I do is the result of profound conviction.—It was not to inflame your passion or from any deep design of coquetry that I left C——; do not try to follow me or to find me: you will not succeed. My precautions to conceal my tracks from you are too well taken; you will always be, in my mind, the man who opened to me a world of novel sensations. Those are things a woman doesn't readily forget. Although absent, I shall think of you often, more often than if you were with me.