the following letter:--

"'MY DEAR HONORINE,--

"'If you had but done me the favor of trusting me, if you had read
the letter I wrote to you five years since, you would have spared
yourself five years of useless labor, and of privations which have
grieved me deeply. In it I proposed an arrangement of which the
stipulations will relieve all your fears, and make our domestic life
possible. I have much to reproach myself with, and in seven years of
sorrow I have discovered all my errors. I misunderstood marriage. I
failed to scent danger when it threatened you. An angel was in the
house. The Lord bid me guard it well! The Lord has punished me for my
audacious confidence.

"'You cannot give yourself a single lash without striking me. Have
mercy on me, my dear Honorine. I so fully appreciated your
susceptibilities that I would not bring you back to the old house in
the Rue Payenne, where I can live without you, but which I could not
bear to see again with you. I am decorating, with great pleasure,
another house, in the Faubourg Saint-Honore, to which, in hope, I
conduct not a wife whom I owe to her ignorance of life, and secured to
me by law, but a sister who will allow me to press on her brow such a
kiss as a father gives the daughter he blesses every day.

"'Will you bereave me of the right I have conquered from your despair
--that of watching more closely over your needs, your pleasures, your
life even? Women have one heart always on their side, always abounding
in excuses--their mother's; you never knew any mother but my mother,
who would have brought you back to me. But how is it that you never