Yes, dear little sister, I am very well settled, as I have told you in
my preceding letters. I have a pretty room, a good fire, a fine
carriage, servants, and a well-furnished table. I have only to believe
myself rich and a Marchioness, since, scarcely ever out of the presence
of my old lady, I am necessarily a sharer in all the comforts of her
life.
But you reproach me with writing very short letters. It is because, up
to this time, I have had but a few moments to myself. In fact, the
Marchioness, who, I believe, wished to put me a little to proof, appears
now to be satisfied that I am quite sincerely devoted to her, and she
permits me to leave her at midnight. So I can chat with you without
having to sit up till four o'clock in the morning to do it, for the
Marchioness receives till two, and she kept me an hour afterward to
discuss the people whom we had just seen,--a task which, I will confess
to you as I confessed to her, began to be very wearisome to me. She
thought that I was, like her, a late riser. When she learned that I
always awoke at six o'clock in the morning, and could not get asleep
again, she generously respected that "provincial infirmity." So, morning
or evening, I shall be hereafter at your service, dear Camille.
Yes, I love this old lady, and I love her a great deal. She has a great
charm for me, and the influence which she exercises over my mind comes
especially from the sincerity and purity of her own. She is not without
prejudices, it is true, and she has many ideas which are not, and never
will be, mine; but she holds to these honestly, without anything like
hypocritical subterfuge, and the antipathies which she expresses are not
at all formidable; for even in her prepossessions her perfect integrity
is manifest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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