Excuse, dear Roger, this nonsense, but I must write you something. After all, my passion is worth as much as yours. Love is the same whether inspired by an empress or a rope-dancer, and I am just as unhappy at Louise's disappearance as you are at Irene's. EDGAR DE MEILHAN XI. ROGER DE MONBERT _to_ MONSIEUR DE MEILHAN, Pont de l'Arche (Eure). PARIS, June 3d 18--. She is in Paris! Before knowing it I felt it. The atmosphere was filled with a voice, a melody, a brightness, a perfume that murmured: Irene is here! Paris appears to me once more populated; the crowd is no longer a desert in my eyes; this great dead city has recovered its spirit of life; the sun once more smiles upon me; the earth bounds under my feet; the soft summer air fans my burning brow, and whispers into my ear that one adored name--Irene! Chance has a treasure-house of atrocious combinations. Chance! The cunning demon! He calls himself Chance so as to better deceive us. With an infernal skilfulness he feigns not to watch us in the decisive moments of our lives, and at the same time leads us like blind fools into the very path he has marked out for us. You know the two brothers Ernest and George de S. were planted by their family in the field of diplomacy: they study Eastern languages and affect Eastern manners. Well, yesterday we met in the Bois de Boulogne, they in a calash, and I on horseback--I am trying riding as a moral hygiene--as the carriage dashed by they called out to me an invitation to dinner; I replied, "Yes," without stopping my horse. Idleness and indolence made me say "Yes," when I should have said, "No;" but _Yes_ is so much easier to pronounce than _No_, especially on horseback. _No_ necessitates a discussion; _Yes_ ends the matter, and economizes words and time. I was rather glad I had met these young sprigs of diplomacy. They are good antidotes for low spirits, for they are always in a hilarious state and enjoy their youth in idle pleasure, knowing they are destined to grow old in the soporific dulness of an Eastern court. I thought we three would be alone at dinner; alas! there were five of us. Two female artistes who revelled in their precocious emancipation; two divinities worshipped in the temple of the grand sculptors of modern Athens; the Scylla and Charybdis of Paris. I am in the habit of bowing with the same apparent respect to every woman in the universe. I have bowed to the ebony women of Senegal; to the moon-colored women of the Southern Archipelago; to the snow-white women of Behring's Strait, and to the bronze women of Lahore and Ceylon. Now it was impossible for me to withdraw from the presence of two fair women whose portraits are the admiration of all connoisseurs who visit the Louvre. Besides, I have a theory: the less respectable a woman is, the more respect we should show her, and thus endeavor to bring her back to virtue.