Madam, let me be very candid; I have a warm temperament, certainly--more

so, perhaps, than an ordinary Provençal. I will confess to even more

than this, if your grace so wills it, and I will not blush for it; but

pray condescend to believe that I am also a respecter of conventional

proprieties, and that I should feel most keenly the loss of your esteem

in this regard.

Now, from a few words of satirical wit, concealed like

small serpents under the flowery condolences of your malicious letter, I

concluded that this miserable fellow Louis, abandoning all

considerations of delicacy, and at the risk of ruining my reputation,

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had played me a most abominable trick, by reading out to you all the

nonsense which I wrote to him last week. You need not deny it! He

confesses it to-day, unblushingly, in the budget of news which he sends

me, adding that you "laughed over it." Good gracious! what can you have

thought of me? After such a story, I certainly could never again look

you in the face, but that I can clear myself by assuring you at once

that all this tale was nothing but a mystification, invented as a return

for some of his impertinent chaff regarding my uncle Barbassou's will.

Louis fell into the trap like any booby. But for him to have drawn you

with him, is enough to make me die of shame.

Madam, I prefer now to make my confession. I am not the hero of a

romance of the Harem. I am a good young man, an advocate of morality and

propriety, notwithstanding the fact that you have often honoured me with

the title of "a regular original." Be so good as to believe, then, that

the most I have been guilty of is a too artless simplicity of character.

I did not suppose that Louis would show you this eccentric letter, for I

had expressly enjoined him to keep it from you. My only crime therefore

in all this matter has been that I forgot that a woman of your

intelligence would read everything, when she had the mind to do so, and

a husband like yours.

In fact, madam, I hardly know why I have taken the trouble to excuse

myself with so much deliberation. I perceive that by such apologies I

run the risk of aggravating my mistake. What did I write, after all, but

a very commonplace specimen of those Arabian stories which girls such

as you have read continually in the winter evenings, under the eyes of

their delighted mothers? When I consider it, I begin to understand that

your laughter, if you did laugh, must have been at the feebleness of my

imagination--you compared it with the Palace of gold and the thousand

wives of the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid.--But please remember, once more,

that I am a poor Provençal and not a Sultan.




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