If you are astonished that all the goddesses are fair, you will be still more astonished at Naples when you see statues with the hair coloured red. It seems that it was the fashion, formerly, for ladies to use red powder, nay, even gold powder. On the other hand, you will see in the paintings at the studios many goddesses with black hair. It is difficult for me to decide which colour I prefer. Only, I advise you not to powder your hair. There is a terrible Greek word which signifies black hair. _Melanchaites_ (Μελαγχαἱτης); this χα has a diabolical sound. I shall remain in Paris all the fall, I fancy, hard at work on a moral book, which will be about as amusing as the social war in which you will engage in Naples. Good-bye. You promised me some words of affection, and while I am still waiting for them, I am not very sanguine of receiving them. You used to admire my wealth of antique gems. Alas! the other day I lost my most beautiful one, a magnificent Juno, while doing a kind act; that is, while carrying home a drunken man who had fractured his thigh. And that stone was an Etruscan. Juno held a scythe, and there is no other monument where she is so represented. Do sympathise with me! XXI You write charmingly in Greek, and much more legibly than you write in French. But who is your Greek teacher? You can not make me believe that you have learned to write that running hand from a book only. Who is the professor of rhetoric at D.? Your letter is very gracious. I say this because I know that you enjoy compliments, and also because it is true. As I shall never learn, however, to correct my unfortunate habit of saying what I think to people who are not _all the world_ to me, you may as well know that I see you are making rapid progress in wickedness, and that I am grieved thereby. You are becoming ironical, sarcastic, and even diabolical. All these words are, as you know, taken from the Greek, and your professor will explain to you what I mean by diabolical; διἁβλος, that is, calumniator. You ridicule my best qualities, and even when you praise me you do so with reservations and hesitations which rob the praise of all its worth. It is a fact that at one time in my life I frequented bad society, but I was attracted to it through curiosity only, and I was always there as a stranger in a strange country. As for good society, I have found it often enough deadly tiresome. There are two places where I am at ease, at least, where I flatter myself I am in my proper element: first, among unpretentious people whom I have known for a long time; secondly, in a Spanish venta, with mule-drivers and Andalusian peasants. Write this in my funeral oration, and you will have told the truth.