and I did not conceal from myself the stoniness of the path nor the Alpine difficulties I had to encounter. I thought of all in my long, long meditations. Do I not know that eminent men like you have known the love they have inspired quite as well as that which they themselves have felt; that they have had many romances in their lives,--you particularly, who send forth those airy visions of your soul that women rush to buy? Yet still I cried to myself, "Onward!" because I have studied, more than you give me credit for, the geography of the great summits of humanity, which you tell me are so cold. Did you not say that Goethe and Byron were the colossi of egoism and poetry? Ah, my friend, there you shared a mistake into which superficial minds are apt to fall; but in you perhaps it came from generosity, false modesty, or the desire to escape from me. Vulgar minds may mistake the effect of toil for the development of personal character, but you must not. Neither Lord Byron, nor Goethe, nor Walter Scott, nor Cuvier, nor any inventor, belongs to himself, he is the slave of his idea. And this mysterious power is more jealous than a woman; it sucks their blood, it makes them live, it makes them die for its sake. The visible developments of their hidden existence do seem, in their results, like egotism; but who shall dare to say that the man who has abnegated self to give pleasure, instruction, or grandeur to his epoch, is an egoist? Is a mother selfish when she immolates all things to her child? Well, the detractors of genius do not perceive its fecund maternity, that is all. The life of a poet is so perpetual a sacrifice that he needs a gigantic organization to bear even the ordinary pleasures of life. Therefore, into what sorrows may he not fall when, like Moliere, he wishes to live the life of feeling in its most poignant crises; to me, remembering his personal life, Moliere's comedy is horrible.
The generosity of genius seems to me half divine; and I place you in this noble family of alleged egoists. Ah! if I had found self-
interest, ambition, a seared nature where I now can see my best loved flowers of the soul, you know not what long anguish I should have had to bear. I met with disappointment before I was sixteen.
What would have become of me had I learned at twenty that fame is a lie, that he whose books express the feelings hidden in my heart was incapable of feeling them himself? Oh! my friend, do you know what would have become of me? Shall I take you into the recesses of my soul? I should have gone to my father and said, "Bring me the son-in-law whom you desire; my will abdicates,--marry me to whom you please." And the man might have been a notary, banker, miser, fool, dullard, wearisome as a rainy day, common as the usher of a school, a manufacturer, or some brave soldier without two ideas,--he would have had a resigned and attentive servant in me. But what an awful suicide! never could my soul have expanded in the life-giving rays of a beloved sun. No murmur should have revealed to my father, or my mother, or my children the suicide of the creature who at this instant is shaking her fetters, casting lightnings from her eyes, and flying towards you with eager wing.
See, she is there, at the angle of your desk, like Polyhymnia, breathing the air of your presence, and glancing about her with a curious eye. Sometimes in the fields where my husband would have taken me to walk, I should have wept, apart and secretly, at sight of a glorious morning; and in my heart, or hidden in a bureau-
drawer, I might have kept some treasure, the comfort of poor girls ill-used by love, sad, poetic souls,--but ah! I have YOU, I
believe in YOU, my friend. That belief straightens all my thoughts and fancies, even the most fantastic, and sometimes--see how far my frankness leads me--I wish I were in the middle of the book we are just beginning; such persistency do I feel in my sentiments, such strength in my heart to love, such constancy sustained by reason, such heroism for the duties for which I was created,--if indeed love can ever be transmuted into duty.
If you were able to follow me to the exquisite retreat where I
fancy ourselves happy, if you knew my plans and projects, the dreadful word "folly!" might escape you, and I should be cruelly punished for sending poetry to a poet. Yes, I wish to be a spring of waters inexhaustible as a fertile land for the twenty years that nature allows me to shine. I want to drive away satiety by charm. I mean to be courageous for my friend as most women are for the world. I wish to vary happiness. I wish to put intelligence into tenderness, and to give piquancy to fidelity. I am filled with ambition to kill the rivals of the past, to conjure away all outside griefs by a wife's gentleness, by her proud abnegation, to take a lifelong care of the nest,--such as birds can only take for a few weeks.
Tell me, do you now think me to blame for my first letter? The mysterious wind of will drove me to you, as the tempest brings the little rose-tree to the pollard window. In your letter, which I
hold here upon my heart, you cried out, like your ancestor when he departed for the Crusades, "God wills it."
Ah! but you will cry out, "What a chatterbox!" All the people round me say, on the contrary, "Mademoiselle is very taciturn."
O. d'Este M.
