And then perhaps I should be the one to cease to love you. I have found you charming; perhaps, by virtue of seeing you often, I should have found you detestable.--Forgive that supposition.--By living with you on terms of close intimacy, I should have occasion, I doubt not, to see you in a cotton night-cap or in some absurd or grotesque domestic situation.--You would necessarily have lost the romantic and mysterious side that charms me above all things, and your character, being better understood, would no longer have seemed so unique to me. I should be less engrossed with you, having you near me, just as it happens with books that one never opens because one has them in his library.--Your nose or your mind would no longer seem to me nearly as well turned; I should notice that your coat didn't fit you, or that your stockings weren't drawn tight; I should have a thousand disillusionments of that sort which would have made me very unhappy, and I should have come at last to this conclusion!--that you certainly had neither heart nor soul, and that I was destined not to be understood in the matter of love. You adore me and I reciprocate the feeling. You have not the slightest reason to reproach me, and I have not the slightest complaint to make of you. I have been perfectly faithful to you throughout our whole _liaison._ I have deceived you in nothing.--I had neither a false bosom nor false virtue; you had the extreme kindness to tell me that I was even more beautiful than you imagined.--In return for the beauty I gave you, you gave me much pleasure; we are quits;--I go my way and you yours, and perhaps we shall meet again at the Antipodes.--Live in that hope. You think perhaps that I do not love because I leave you. Later you will realize how far that is true.--If I had cared less for you, I would have remained and poured out the insipid draught for you to the dregs. Your love would soon have been dead of ennui; after some time you would have entirely forgotten me, and as you read my name on the list of your conquests, you would have asked yourself: "Who the devil was she?"--I have at least the satisfaction of thinking that you will remember me more than some others.--Your unsatisfied desire will still spread its wings to fly to me; I shall always be to you something desirable to which your fancy will love to return, and I hope that in the bed of the mistresses you may have hereafter, you will think sometimes of the single night you passed with me. You will never be more lovable than you were on that blessed evening, and even if you should be as much so, that would show a falling-off; for in love, as in poetry, to remain at the same point is to retrograde. Cling to that impression--you will do well. You have made the task of such lovers as I may have--if I have other lovers--a difficult one, and no one will ever be able to efface my memory of you;--they will be the heirs of Alexander.