Our Letters
Night hours in the train induce sleep in some and insomnia in others. With me, any journey prevents my sleeping on the following night.
I had arrived, about five o’clock, at the estate of Abelle, which belongs to my friends, the Murets d’Artus, to spend three weeks there. It is a pretty house, built by one of their grandfathers in the latter half of the last century, and it has remained in the family. Therefore it has that intimate character of dwellings that have always been inhabited, furnished, animated and enlivened by the same people. Nothing changes; none of the soul evaporates from the dwelling, in which the furniture has never been moved, the tapestries never taken down, and have become worn out, faded, discoloured, on the same walls. None of the old furniture leaves the place; only from time to time it is moved a little to make room for a new piece, which enters there like a newborn infant in the midst of brothers and sisters.
The house is on a hill in the centre of a park which slopes down to the river, where there is a little stone bridge. Beyond the water the fields stretch out in the distance, where cows wander slowly, pasturing on the moist grass; their humid eyes seem full of the dew, mist and freshness of the pasture. I love this dwelling, just as one loves a thing which one ardently desires to possess. I return here every autumn with infinite delight; I leave with regret.
After I had dined with this friendly family, by whom I was received like a relative, I asked my chum, Paul Muret: “Which room did you give me this year?”
“Aunt Rose’s room.”
An hour later, followed by her three children, two tall little girls and a great lump of a boy, Madame Muret d’Artus installed me in Aunt Rose’s room, where I had not yet slept.
When I was alone I examined the walls, the furniture, the general aspect of the room, in order to attune my mind to it. I knew it, but not very well, as I had entered it only once or twice, and I looked indifferently at a pastel portrait of Aunt Rose, who gave her name to the room.
This old Aunt Rose, with her hair in curls, looking at me from behind the glass, made very little impression on my mind. She looked to me like a woman of former days, with principles and precepts, as strong on the maxims of morality as on cooking recipes, one of these old aunts who are a wet blanket on gaiety and the stern and wrinkled angel of provincial families.
I never had heard her spoken of; I knew nothing of her life or of her death. Did she belong to this century or to the preceding one? Had she left this earth after a calm or a stormy existence? Had she given up to heaven the pure soul of an old maid, the calm soul of a spouse, the tender one of a mother, or one moved by love? What difference I did it make? The name alone, “Aunt Rose,” seemed ridiculous, common, ugly.
I picked up a candle and looked at her severe face, hanging far up in an old gilt frame. Then, as I found it insignificant, disagreeable, even unsympathetic, I began to examine the furniture. It dated from the period of Louis XVI, the Revolution and the Directoire. Not a chair, not a curtain had entered this room since then, and it gave out the subtle odour of memories, which is the combined odour of wood, cloth, chairs, hangings, peculiar to places wherein have lived hearts that have loved and suffered.
I retired but did not sleep. After I had tossed about for an hour or two, I decided to get up and write some letters.
I opened a little mahogany desk with brass trimmings, which was placed between the two windows, in hope of finding some ink and paper; but all I found was a quill-pen, very much worn, made of a porcupine’s quill, and chewed at the end. I was about to close this piece of furniture, when a shining spot attracted my attention: it looked like the yellow head of a nail, and it formed a little round lump at the corner of a tray. I scratched it with my finger, and it seemed to move. I seized it between two fingernails, and pulled as hard as I could. It came toward me gently. It was a long gold pin which had been slipped into a hole in the wood and remained hidden there.
Why? I immediately thought that it must have served to work some spring which hid a secret, and I looked. It took a long time. After at least two hours of investigation, I discovered another hole opposite the first one, but at the bottom of a groove. Into this I stuck my pin: a little shelf sprang up in my face, and I saw two packages of yellow letters, tied with a blue ribbon.
I read them. Here are two of them:
So you wish me to return to you your letters, my dearest. Here they are, but it pains me to obey. Of what are you afraid? That I might lose them? But they are under lock and key. Do you fear that they might be stolen? I guard against that, for they are my dearest treasure.
Yes, it pains me deeply. I wondered whether, perhaps, you might not be feeling some regret at the bottom of your heart? Not regret at having loved me, for I know that you still do, but regret at having expressed on white paper this living love in hours when your heart did not confide in me, but in the pen you held in your hand. When we love, we have need of confession, need of talking or writing, and we either talk or write. Words fly away, those sweet words made of music, air and tenderness, warm and light, which escape as soon as they are uttered, which remain in the memory alone, but which one can neither see, touch nor kiss, like the words written by your hand. Your letters? Yes, I am returning them to you! But with what sorrow!
Undoubtedly, you must have had an afterthought of delicate shame at expressions that are ineffaceable. In your sensitive and timid soul, which can be hurt by an impalpable shade, you must have regretted having written to a man that you loved him. You remembered sentences that called up recollections, and you said to yourself: “I will make ashes of those words.”
Be satisfied, be calm. Here are your letters. I love you.
My Friend:
No, you have not understood me, you have not guessed. I do not regret, and I never shall, that I told you of my affection. I will always write to you, but you must return my letters to me as soon as you have read them.
I shall shock you, dear, when I tell you the reason for this demand. It is not poetic, as you imagined, but practical. I am afraid, not of you, but of some mischance. I am guilty. I do not wish my fault to affect others than myself.
Understand me well. You and I may both die. You might fall off your horse, since you ride every day; you might die from a sudden attack, from a duel, from heart disease, from a carriage accident, in a thousand ways. For, if there is only one death, there are more ways of its reaching us than there are days for us to live.
Then your sisters, your brother, or your sister-in-law might find my letters! Do you think that they love me? I doubt it. And then, even if they adored me, is it possible for two women and one man to know a secret—such a secret!—and not to tell of it?
I seem to be saying something very dreadful by speaking first of your death, and then suspecting the discreetness of your relatives.
But don’t all of us die sooner or later? And it is almost certain that one of us will precede the other under the ground. We must therefore foresee all dangers, even that one.
As for me, I will keep your letters beside mine, in the secret of my little desk. I will show them to you there, sleeping side by side in their silken hiding place, full of our love, like lovers in a tomb.
You will say to me: “But if you should die first, my dear, your husband will find these letters.”
Oh! I fear nothing. First of all, he does not know the secret of my desk, and he will not look for it. And even if he finds it after my death, I fear nothing.
Did you ever stop to think of all the love letters that have been found in the drawers of dead women? I have been thinking of this for a long time, and that is the reason I decided to ask you for my letters.
Think that never, do you understand, never, does a woman burn, tear or destroy the letters in which she is told that she is loved. That is our whole life, our whole hope, expectation and dream. These little pieces of paper which bear our name in caressing terms are relics, and we women have chapels, especially chapels in which we are the saints. Our love letters are our titles to beauty, grace, seduction, the intimate vanity of our womanhood; they are the treasures of our heart. No, a woman never destroys these secret and delicious archives of her life.
But, like everybody else, we die, and then—then these letters are found! Who finds them? The husband. Then what does he do? Nothing. He burns them.
Oh, I have thought a great deal about that! Just think that every day women are dying who have been loved; every day the traces and proofs of their fault fall into the hands of their husbands, and that there is never a scandal, never a duel.
Think, my dear, of what a man’s heart is. He avenges himself on a living woman; he fights with the man who has dishonoured her, kills him while she lives, because—well, why? I do not know exactly why. But if, after her death, he finds similar proofs, he burns them and no one is the wiser, and he continues to shake hands with the friend of the dead woman, and feels quite at ease that these letters should not have fallen into strange hands, and that they are destroyed.
Oh, how many men I know among my friends who must have burned such proofs, and who pretend to know nothing, and yet who would have fought madly had they found them when she was still alive! But she is dead. Honour has changed. The grave gives absolution for conjugal sins.
Therefore, I can safely keep our letters, which, in your hands, would be a menace to both of us. Do you dare to say that I am not right?
I raised my eyes to the portrait of Aunt Rose, and as I looked at her severe, wrinkled face, I thought of all those women’s souls which we do not know, and which we suppose to be so different from what they really are, whose inborn and ingenuous craftiness we never can penetrate, their quiet duplicity; and a verse of Vigny returned to my memory:
“Toujours ce compagnon dont le coeur n’est pas sûr.”30