Poor little Blue Duchess, the sincere lover of the least loving of my friends, romantic child stranded by an ironical caprice of fate in the profession most fatal to mystery, silence and solitude, when the pretty, delicate flowers of your woman’s soul needed a warm atmosphere of protective intimacy, say, did you suspect my emotion when I looked at your face, paled by the pleasures of the previous evening, smiling at me thus by the side of another face, the face of the innocent child you were once, when I might have loved you as my betrothed wife? No, certainly you did not. For you were good; and if you had guessed what I suffered, you would not have imposed upon me this useless ordeal. You would not on that visit have arranged with me the details of that series of sittings which began the following day and were for me a strange and sorrowful Calvary! Yes, however, perhaps you did guess, for there was sadness and pity in your smile—sorrow for yourself and pity for me. You saw so clearly from that moment that I bore an affection for you which was too quickly awakened to be the reasonable and simple friendship of a comrade! You saw it without wishing to admit it, for love is an egoist. Yours had need of being related, to be encouraged in its hopes, comforted in its doubts, and pitied in its grief. Who would have rendered you the service of lending himself as a complaisant echo of your passion like I did? If it cost me my rest for weeks and weeks; if on your departure from my studio after each sitting, just as after your first visit, I remained for hours struggling against the bitterness of which I have not yet emptied my heart, you did not wish to know, and I had not the strength to condemn you to do so. After all, you made me feel, as Jacques used to say, and there will come a time perhaps when, passing my memories in review, I shall bless you for the tears I shed, sometimes as if I were no more than eighteen, on your account, who did not see them. Had you seen them, you would have refused to believe in them, to preserve the right to initiate me into the inner tragedy in which you then lived, and which by a counter stroke, alas! was not spared me. If I allowed these impressions to go on, I should fill the pages with groans like this, and never reach the tragedy itself, or rather the tragic comedy, in which I played the part of the ancient Chorus, the ineffectual witness of catastrophies, who deplored them without preventing them. Let us employ the only remedy for this useless elegy. Let us note the little facts clearly. I have mentioned that this visit of mother and daughter had as its object the arrangement of a series of sittings. I have also mentioned that the first of these sittings was placed for the following day.