I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared that if I do not go out of this watery atmosphere and verdant Bastile I shall perish of sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration was for the moment such that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was going to get into a passion. It would have been so refreshing! After twenty-six days of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have been positively delightful to have had a storm. But no! For an instant she looked at me with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove's eyes filled, she sighed, she left the room! Do they not say that feather beds offer an admirable defence against bullets? I feel like the bullet which has been fired into the feather bed. The feather bed is victorious. I see the Rue des Planches through the perspective of the watery atmosphere; the Casino seems to smile at me from the end of the interminable lime-tree avenue, which is one of the chief beauties of this house; but, alas! they are both as far off as if Trouville were in the moon. What could they do to me if I came alone? Do you know what they could do? I have not the remotest idea, but I imagine something frightful. They shut up their public-houses by force, and their dancing-places. Perhaps they would shut up me. In England they have a great belief in creating virtue by Act of Parliament. In myself this enforced virtue creates such a revolt that I shall _tirer sur le mors_, and fly before very long. The admired excellence of this beautiful estate is that it lies in a ring-fence. I feel that I shall take a leap over that ring-fence. Do not mistake me, _cara mia Teresina_, I am exceedingly fond of my wife. I think her quite lovely, simple, saintly, and truly woman-like. She is exquisitely pretty, and entirely without vanity, and I am certain she is immeasurably my superior morally, and possibly mentally too. But--there is always such a long and melancholy "but" attached to marriage--she does not amuse me in the least. She is always the same. She is shocked at nearly everything that is natural or diverting. She thinks me unmanly because I dislike rain. She buttons about her a hideous, straight, water-proof garment, and walks out in a deluge. She blushes if I try to make her laugh at "Figaro," and she goes out of the room when I mention Trouville. What am I to do with a woman like this? It is an admirable type, no doubt. Possibly, if she had not shut me up in a country house in a wet June, with the thermometer at 10° R., and the barometer fixedly at the word _Rainy_, I might have been always charmed with this St. Dorothea-like attitude and never have found out the monotony of it. But, as it is, I yawn till I dislocate my neck. She thinks me a heathen already. I am convinced that very soon she will think me a brute. And I am neither. I only want to get out, like the bird in the cage. It is a worn simile, but it is such a true one. * * * * *