a supper——The wine laughs in the crystal goblet, the white and gold pheasant smokes in a platter bearing her crest: the feast is prolonged far into the night and you can imagine that I don't finish up the night at home.
Sometimes it is in a great forest.—The hunt sweeps by; the horn rings out, the pack gives tongue and crosses the path with the swiftness of lightning; the fair one in a riding habit is mounted on a Turkish horse, white as milk, spirited and swift beyond words. Although she is an excellent horsewoman, he paws and curvets and rears, and she has all the difficulty in the world in holding him; he takes the bit in his teeth and rushes straight toward a precipice with her. I fall from heaven for the express purpose of saving her, I stop the horse, I catch the swooning princess in my arms, I bring her to herself and escort her to her château. What well-born woman would refuse her heart to a man who has risked his life for her?—None;—and gratitude is a cross-cut that leads very quickly to love.
You will agree, at all events, that when I go into romance, I don't stop half-way, and that I am as mad as it is possible for a man to be. That is as it should be, for nothing in the world is more sickening than rational madness. You will agree also that, when I write letters, they are volumes rather than simple notes. I love whatever goes beyond ordinary bounds in everything.—That is why I love you. Don't laugh too much at all the nonsense I have scribbled; I lay aside my pen to carry some of it into execution; for I recur always to my refrain! I mean to have a mistress. I cannot say whether it will be the lady of the park or the lady of the balcony, but I bid you farewell to go in quest of her. My mind is made up. Though she whom I seek should hide herself in the heart of the kingdom of Cathay or Samarcand, I shall find a way to dislodge her. I will let you know of the success or non-success of my undertaking. I hope that it will be success: give me your prayers, my dear friend. As for myself, I dress up in my best coat, and go out of the house determined not to return except with such a mistress as I have in my mind.—I have dreamed long enough; now to work.
P.S.—Tell me something about little D——; what has become of him? no one here knows anything about him; and give my compliments to your good brother and all the family.
II
Well, my friend, I have come home again, I have not been to Cathay or Cashmere or Samarcand;—but it is fair to say that I am no nearer having a mistress than ever.—And yet I took myself by the hand, I swore a mighty oath that I would go to the end of the world. I have not even been to the end of the town. I don't know what the matter is with me, but I have never been able to keep my word to anybody, even to myself: it must be that the devil takes a hand in it. If I say: "I will go there to-morrow," it is certain that I shall stay at home; if I propose to go to the wine-shop, I go to church; if I start to go to church, the roads get tangled under my feet like skeins of thread, and I find myself in an entirely different place. I fast when I have determined to have a debauch, and so it goes. Therefore I am inclined to believe that what prevents me from having a mistress is that I have determined to have one.
I must tell you about my expedition, step by step: it is well worth the honors of narration. I had passed at least two full hours at my toilet that day. I had had my hair combed and curled and my moustaches, such as they are, twisted and waxed a little; and as the excitement of longing imparted some slight animation to my ordinarily pale face, really I was not so bad. At last, after scrutinizing myself attentively in the mirror in different lights, to see if I was fine enough and if my bearing was sufficiently gallant, I went resolutely forth with head erect, chin well raised, eyes front, one hand on the hip, making the heels of my boots ring like an anspessade, elbowing the bourgeois, and with a flawlessly triumphant and all-conquering air.
I was like another Jason setting out to conquer the Golden Fleece.—But, alas! Jason was more fortunate than I: besides the conquest of the fleece, he made, at the same time, the conquest of a beautiful princess, and I—I have neither fleece nor princess.
I walked through the streets, eying all the women, and hurrying toward them and gazing at them at closer quarters when they seemed to me to be worth the trouble of examining.—Some assumed their high and mighty virtuous air and passed without raising their eyes.—Others were surprised at first, then smiled if they had white teeth.—Some turned after a little time, to look at me when they thought I was not looking at them, and blushed like cherries when they found themselves face to face with me.—It was a lovely day; there were quantities of people out walking.—And yet I must confess, notwithstanding all the respect I feel for that interesting half of the human race, which is called by common consent the fair sex, it is, as a whole, devilishly ugly: out of a hundred women there is hardly one who is passably good-looking. This one had a moustache; that one had a blue nose; others had red spots in place of eyebrows; one was not badly built, but she had a pimply face. The head of another was charming, but she could scratch her ear with her shoulder; a third would have put Praxiteles to shame with the graceful roundness of certain outlines, but she stumbled along on feet like Turkish stirrups. Another exhibited the most magnificent shoulders imaginable; in revenge, her hands resembled in shape and size those immense scarlet gloves that haberdashers use for signs.—Generally speaking, what tired-looking faces! how worn and streaked they were, withered by degrading petty passions and petty vices! What expressions of envy, of malevolent curiosity, of avarice, of brazen coquetry! and how much uglier is a woman who is not beautiful, than a man who is not handsome!
I saw nobody worth looking at—except a few grisettes;—but they have more cotton than silk to rumple, and they don't interest me.—In very truth, I believe that man, and when I say man I include woman, is the vilest animal on the face of the earth. That quadruped who walks on his hind feet seems to me extraordinarily presumptuous to claim the first place in creation as his undoubted right. A lion, a tiger, are finer animals than men, and in their species many individuals attain all the beauty that belongs to it. But such a thing rarely happens among human beings.—How many abortions for one Antinous! how many Goths for one Phyllis!
I am very much afraid, my dear friend, that I shall never be able to embrace my ideal, and yet there is nothing extraordinary or unnatural about it.—It is not the ideal of a third-form school-boy. I do not ask for ivory globes or alabaster pillars, or azure veins; I have not used in its composition either lilies, or snow, or roses, or jet, or ebony, or coral, or ambrosia, or pearls or diamonds; I have left the stars of heaven at rest, and I have not unhung the sun unseasonably. It is almost a bourgeois ideal, it is so simple, and it seems to me that with a bag or two of piastres I could find it all ready-made and realized in the first bazaar I might happen upon at Constantinople or Smyrna; it would probably cost me less than a blooded horse or dog; and to think that I shall not get what I want, for I have a feeling that I shall not! It is enough to drive a man mad, and I fly into the hottest sort of a rage against fate.
You are not such a mad fool as I, you are fortunate;—you have simply taken your life as it came, without tormenting yourself trying to shape it, and you have dealt with things as they turned up. You haven't sought for happiness, it has come in search of you; you love and are loved.—I don't envy you;—for Heaven's sake, don't think that! but I am not so happy as I ought to be when I think of your felicity, and I say to myself, with a sigh, that I would like to enjoy felicity of the same sort.
Perhaps my happiness passed by my side and I did not see it, blind that I was; perhaps a voice spoke, and the uproar of my internal tempests prevented me from hearing it.
Perhaps I have been loved in secret by some humble heart that I have neglected or broken; perhaps I have myself been the ideal of another, the pole-star of a suffering heart—the dream of a night and the thought of a day.—If I had looked at my feet, perhaps I should have seen there some fair Magdalene with her box of ointment and her dishevelled hair. I walked along with my arms raised to heaven, longing to pluck the stars that fled
