'My DEAR RENÉ,--I am writing you these lines from your Venice--from that Venice whence you evoked the cruel features of your Cœlia and the sweet face of your Beatrice; and as this fairy-like city is, as it always was, the land of improbabilities, the city of the Undines, which on these Eastern shores are called sirens, I have, like Byron, discovered a small furnished suite in a most delightful little palace on the Grand Canal, a _palazzino_ with marble medallions on its façade, all ornamented, carved, and engraved, and leaning as badly as I do on my bad days. As I scribble this letter I have the blue waters of the Canal Grande under my window and around me the peace of this great city--the Cora Pearl of the Adriatic, a wretched play-writer would say--like the silence of a dream. My dear fellow, why have I brought my battered old heart here of all places--here, where I feel it beat louder and stronger in the sweet stillness? I must tell you that it is two o'clock, that I have just breakfasted at Florian's under the arcades after having been to San Giorgio in Bragora to look at a divine Cima, that I am to dine to-night with two ladies directly descended from the Doges--fair as the creations of Veronese--and some Russians as amusing as our friend Beyle's Korazoff, and that, instead of feeling elated, I have come home to look at Her Portrait--with a capital H and a capital P--the portrait of Colette! René, René, why am I not seated in my stall at the Théâtre Français, gazing at her as Camille in "On ne badine pas avec l'amour"--a divine play, as bitter as "Adolphe," yet as sweet as the music of Mozart? Do you remember her smile as she holds her pretty head on one side and says, "Are you sure that a woman lies with all her soul when her tongue lies?" Do you remember Perdican and these words: "Pride, thou most fatal of human counsellors, why art thou come between this maid and me?" All my story--all our story lies in those few words. Only it happens that I am the real Perdican of the play, having in my soul that source of idealism and love, ever flowing in spite of experience, ever pure in spite of so many sins! And she, my Camille, has been stained by so much shame that nought can wash her clean! Alas! how sadly the world treated my flower--when I wished to inhale its fragrance I found instead a smell as of the grave.