Has the duke obtained for me the thing we wanted; and shall you, my dearest life, be ordered to drink the Baden waters next year? The billing and cooing of the “handsome disconsolate,” compared with the accents of our happy love--so true and changeless for now ten years!--have given me a great contempt for marriage. I had never seen the thing so near. Ah, dearest! what the world calls a “false step” brings two beings nearer together than the law--does it not? The concluding idea served as a text for two pages of reminiscences and aspirations a little too confidential for publication. The evening before the day on which Canalis put the above epistle into the post, Butscha, under the name of Jean Jacmin, had received a letter from his fictitious cousin, Philoxene, and had mailed his answer, which thus preceded the letter of the poet by about twelve hours. Terribly anxious for the last two weeks, and wounded by Melchior’s silence, the duchess herself dictated Philoxene’s letter to her cousin, and the moment she had read the answer, rather too explicit for her quinquagenary vanity, she sent for the banker and made close inquiries as to the exact fortune of Monsieur Mignon. Finding herself betrayed and abandoned for the millions, Eleonore gave way to a paroxysm of anger, hatred, and cold vindictiveness. Philoxene knocked at the door of the sumptuous room, and entering found her mistress with her eyes full of tears,--so unprecedented a phenomenon in the fifteen years she had waited upon her that the woman stopped short stupefied. “We expiate the happiness of ten years in ten minutes,” she heard the duchess say. “A letter from Havre, madame.” Eleonore read the poet’s prose without noticing the presence of Philoxene, whose amazement became still greater when she saw the dawn of fresh serenity on the duchess’s face as she read further and further into the letter. Hold out a pole no thicker than a walking-stick to a drowning man, and he will think it a high-road of safety. The happy Eleonore believed in Canalis’s good faith when she had read through the four pages in which love and business, falsehood and truth, jostled each other. She who, a few moments earlier, had sent for her husband to prevent Melchior’s appointment while there was still time, was now seized with a spirit of generosity that amounted almost to the sublime. “Poor fellow!” she thought; “he has not had one faithless thought; he loves me as he did on the first day; he tells me all--Philoxene!” she cried, noticing her maid, who was standing near and pretending to arrange the toilet-table. “Madame la duchesse?” “A mirror, child!”