Poor flower, in your box of wet moss, what has become of you? Are you dead, and dried in your wife's _hortus siccus_? She would be quite sure of you _then_, and I dare say much happier than if you were set forth in anybody else's bouquet. I try in vain to imagine you in that "perfectly proper" _milieu_ (is not that correct English, "perfectly proper"?). Will you be dreadfully changed when one sees you again? There is a French proverb which says that "the years of joy count double." The days of _ennui_ certainly count for years, and give us gray hairs before we are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You _would_ marry an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her tea. I told you beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once shut up in the country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What people!--to put him in prison for a little bit of _chiasso_ like that! You should never have taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that doleful and damp land of precisians. What will they do with him? And what can you do without him? The weather here is admirable. There are numbers of people one knows. It is really very amusing. I go and dance every night, and then we play,--usually "bac," or roulette. Everybody is very merry. We all talk often of you, and say the _De Profundis_ over you, my poor Piero. Why did your cruel destiny make you see a _Sainte-Nitouche_ drinking tea under a lime-tree? I suppose _Sainte-Nitouche_ would not permit it, else why not exchange the humid greenness of your matrimonial prison for the Rue des Planches and the Casino? * * * * * _From the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva, Trouville._ _Carissima mia_,--