one word unseal your eyes! But, if that does not suffice, learn

that your notes have been protested at the instigation of a Sieur
Lecuyer, formerly head-clerk to Maitre Solonet, a notary in

Bordeaux. That usurer in embryo (who came from Gascony for
jobbery) is the proxy of your very honorable mother-in-law, who is

the actualholder of your notes for one hundred thousand francs,
on which I am told that worthy woman doled out to you only seventy

thousand. Compared with Madame Evangelista, papa Gobseck is
flannel, velvet, vanilla cream, a sleepingdraught. Your vineyard

of Belle-Rose is to fall into the clutches of your wife, to whom
her mother pays the difference between the price it goes for at

the auction sale and the amount of her dower claim upon it. Madame
Evangelista will also have the farms at Guadet and Grassol, and

the mortgages on your house in Bordeaux already belong to her, in
the names of straw men provided by Solonet.

Thus these two excellent women will make for themselves a united
income of one hundred and twenty thousand francs a year out of

your misfortunes and forced sale of property, added to the revenue
of some thirty-odd thousand on the Grand-livre which these cats

already possess.
The endorsement of your wife was not needed; for this morning the

said Sieur Lecuyer came to offer me a return of the sum I had lent
you in exchange for a legal transfer of my rights. The vintage of

1825 which your mother-in-law keeps in the cellars at Lanstrac
will suffice to pay me.

These two women have calculated, evidently, that you are now upon
the ocean; but I send this letter by courier, so that you may have

time to follow the advice I now give you.
I made Lecuyer talk. I disentangled from his lies, his language,

and his reticence, the threads I lacked to bring to light the
whole plot of the domesticconspiracy hatched against you. This

evening, at the Spanish embassy, I shall offer my admiring
compliments to your mother-in-law and your wife. I shall pay

court to Madame Evangelista; I intend to desert you basely, and
say sly things to your discredit,--nothing openly, or that

Mascarille in petticoats would detect my purpose. How did you make
her such an enemy? That is what I want to know. If you had had the

wit to be in love with that woman before you married her daughter,
you would to-day be peer of France, Duc de Manerville, and,

possibly, ambassador to Madrid.
If you had come to me at the time of your marriage, I would have

helped you to analyze and know the women to whom you were binding
yourself; out of our mutual observations safety might have been

yours. But, instead of that, these women judged me, became afraid
of me, and separated us. If you had not stupidly given in to them

and turned me the cold shoulder, they would never have been able
to ruin you. Your wife brought on the coldness between us,

instigated by her mother, to whom she wrote two letters a week,--a
fact to which you paid no attention. I recognized my Paul when I

heard that detail.
Within a month I shall be so intimate with your mother-in-law that

I shall hear from her the reasons of the hispano-italiano hatred
which she feels for you,--for you, one of the best and kindest men

on earth! Did she hate you before her daughter fell in love with
Felix de Vandenesse; that's a question in my mind. If I had not

taken a fancy to go to the East with Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and
a few other good fellows of your acquaintance, I should have been

in a position to tell you something about that affair, which was
beginning just as I left Paris. I saw the first gleams even then

of your misfortune. But what gentleman is base enough to open such
a subject unless appealed to? Who shall dare to injure a woman, or

break that illusive mirror in which his friend delights in gazing
at the fairy scenes of a happy marriage? Illusions are the riches

of the heart.
Your wife, dear friend, is, I believe I may say, in the fullest

application of the word, a fashionable woman. She thinks of
nothing but her social success, her dress, her pleasures; she goes

to opera and theatre and balls; she rises late and drives to the
Bois, dines out, or gives a dinner-party. Such a life seems to me

for women very much what war is for men; the public sees only the
victors; it forgets the dead. Many delicate women perish in this

conflict; those who come out of it have iron constitutions,
consequently no heart, but good stomachs. There lies the reason of

the cold insensibility of social life. Fine souls keep themselves
reserved, weak and tender natures succumb; the rest are

cobblestones which hold the social organ in its place, water-worn
and rounded by the tide, but never worn-out. Your wife has

maintained that life with ease; she looks made for it; she is
always fresh and beautiful. To my mind the deduction is plain,--

she has never loved you; and you have loved her like a madman.
To strike out love from that siliceous nature a man of iron was

needed. After standing, but without enduring, the shock of Lady
Dudley, Felix was the fitting mate to Natalie. There is no great

merit in divining that to you she was indifferent. In love with
her yourself, you have been incapable of perceiving the cold

nature of a young woman whom you have fashioned and trained for a
man like Vandenesse. The coldness of your wife, if you perceived

it, you set down, with the stupid jurisprudence of married people,
to the honor of her reserve and her innocence. Like all husbands,

you thought you could keep her virtuous in a society where women
whisper from ear to ear that which men are afraid to say.

No, your wife has liked the social benefits she derived from
marriage, but the private burdens of it she found rather heavy.

Those burdens, that tax was--you! Seeing nothing of all this, you
have gone on digging your abysses (to use the hackneyed words of

rhetoric) and covering them with flowers. You have mildly obeyed
the law which rules the ruck of men; from which I desired to

protect you. Dear fellow! only one thing was wanting to make you
as dull as the bourgeois deceived by his wife, who is all

astonishment or wrath, and that is that you should talk to me of
your sacrifices, your love for Natalie, and chant that psalm:

"Ungrateful would she be if she betrayed me; I have done this, I
have done that, and more will I do; I will go to the ends of the

earth, to the Indies for her sake. I--I--" etc. My dear Paul, have
you never lived in Paris, have you never had the honor of

belonging by ties of friendship to Henri de Marsay, that you
should be so ignorant of the commonest things, the primitive

principles that move the femininemechanism, the a-b-c of their
hearts? Then hear me:--

Suppose you exterminate yourself, suppose you go to Saint-Pelagie
for a woman's debts, suppose you kill a score of men, desert a

dozen women, serve like Laban, cross the deserts, skirt the
galleys, cover yourself with glory, cover yourself with shame,

refuse, like Nelson, to fight a battle until you have kissed the
shoulder of Lady Hamilton, dash yourself, like Bonaparte, upon the

bridge at Arcola, go mad like Roland, risk your life to dance five
minutes with a woman--my dear fellow, what have all those things

to do with LOVE? If love were won by samples such as those mankind
would be too happy. A spurt of prowess at the moment of desire

would give a man the woman that he wanted. But love, LOVE, my good
Paul, is a faith like that in the Immaculate conception of the

Holy Virgin; it comes, or it does not come. Will the mines of
Potosi, or the shedding of our blood, or the making of our fame

serve to waken an involuntary, an inexplicablesentiment? Young
men like you, who expect to be loved as the balance of your

account, are nothing else than usurers. Our legitimate wives owe
us virtue and children, but they don't owe us love.

Love, my dear Paul, is the sense of pleasure given and received,
and the certainty of giving and receiving it; love is a desire