closely scanned the edge of her dress to see if some azure reflection
had not altered the whiteness of her stocking. I abhor women who take
blue-ink baths. Alas! they are much worse than the avowed literary
woman; she affects to talk of nothing but ribbons, dress and bonnets,
and confidentially gives you a receipt for preserving lemons and making
strawberry cream; they take pride in not ignoring housekeeping, and
faithfully follow the fashions. At their homes ink, pen and paper are
nowhere to be seen; their odes and elegies are written on the back of a
bill or on a page torn from an account-book.

La Marquise contemplates reform, romances, social poetry, humanitarian
and palingenesic treatises, and scattered about on the tables and chairs
were to be seen solemn old books, dog-leaved at their most tiresome
pages, all of which is very appalling. Nothing is more convenient than a
muse whose complete works are printed; one knows then what to expect,
and you have not always the reading of Damocles hanging over your head.

Dragged by a fatality that so often makes me the victim of women I do
not admire, I became the Conrad, the Lara of this Byronic heroine.

Every morning she sent me folio-sized epistles, dated three hours after
midnight. They were compilations from Frederick Soulié, Eugene Sue, and
Alexander Dumas, glorious authors, whom I delight to read save in my
amorous correspondence, where a feminine mistake in orthography gives me
more pleasure than a phrase plagiarised from George Sand, or a pathetic
tirade stolen from a popular dramatist.

In short, I do not believe in a passion told in language that smells of
the lamp; and the expression "_Je t'aime_" will scarcely persuade me if
it be not written "_Je thême_."