If it grieves you too deeply to lose me, burn this letter, which is the only proof that you have had me, and you will think you have had a pleasant dream. What is there to prevent that? The vision vanished before dawn, just at the hour when dreams return home through the doors of horn or ivory.--How many men have died, less fortunate than you, without giving so much as a single kiss to their chimera! I am neither whimsical nor mad nor prudish.--What I do is the result of profound conviction.--It was not to inflame your passion or from any deep design of coquetry that I left C----; do not try to follow me or to find me: you will not succeed. My precautions to conceal my tracks from you are too well taken; you will always be, in my mind, the man who opened to me a world of novel sensations. Those are things a woman doesn't readily forget. Although absent, I shall think of you often, more often than if you were with me. Do your best to console poor Rosette, who is likely to be at least as grieved as you at my departure. Love each other well in memory of me, whom you have both loved, and mention my name sometimes in a kiss.