This devotion is annoying, and I am determined to nip it in the bud; it fills me with a horrible dread that in no way resembles the charming fear I have dreamed of. The young poet takes a serious view of the flattery I bestowed upon him only in order to discover what his friend had written about me; he has persuaded himself that I love him, and I despair of being able to dispel the foolish notion. I have uselessly assumed the furious air of an angry Minerva, the majestic deportment of the Queen of England opening Parliament, the prudish, affected behavior of a school-mistress on promenade; all this only incites his hopes. If it were love it might be seductive and dangerous, but it is nothing more than magnetism.... You may laugh, but it is surely this and nothing else; he acts as if he were under some spell of fascination; he looks at me in a malevolent way that he thinks irresistible.... But I find it unendurable. I shall end by frankly telling him that in point of magnetism I am no longer free ... "that I love another," as the vaudeville says, and if he asks who is this other, I shall smilingly tell him, "it is the famous disciple of Mesmer, Dr. Dupotet." Yesterday his foolish behavior was very near causing my death. Alarmed by an embarrassing tête-à-tête in the midst of an old castle we were visiting, I mounted the window-sill in one of the towers to call Madame Taverneau, whom I saw at the foot of the hill; the stone on which I stood gave way, and if M. de Meilhan had not shown great presence of mind and caught me, I would have fallen down a precipice forty feet deep! Instant death would have been the result. Oh! how frightened I was! I tremble yet. My terror was so great that I would have fainted if I had had a little more confidence; but another fear made me recover from this. Fortunately I am going away from here, and this trifling will be over.