Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/136

1774] Eleven o'clock, 1774. Have the delicacy to cease persecuting me. I have but one wish, I have but one need : it is not to see you again in private. I can do nothing for your happiness, I know nothing with which to console you : leave me therefore, and do not any longer take pleasure in torturing my life. I make you no reproaches ; you suffer, I pity you, and I shall not speak to you again of my sorrows. But in the name of that which still has some empire over your soul, in the name of hon- our, in the name of virtue, leave me, and count no longer upon me. If I can calm myself, I shall live ; but if you con- tinue to act as you do, you will soon reduce me to the strength of despair : spare me the grief and the embarrassment of order- ing my door to be closed to you during the hours when I am alone. I request you, and for the last time, not to come to me except between five o'clock and nine.

If Mme. de. . . could read my soul, I assure you she would not hate me ; at the most, I have put a few regrets into hers : but you and she have made me feel the tortures of the damned, repentance, hatred, jealousy, remorse, con- tempt of myself, and sometimes of you — in short, all the misery of passion, but never that which makes the hap- piness of an honourable and sensitive soul. This is what I owe to you : but I forgive you. If I clung to life I should not be so generous ; I should vow to you an implacable ha- tred. But soon I shall no more cling to you than I do to life, and I wish to employ my soul, my sensibility, all that remains to me of existence in loving, adoring the only being who ever truly filled my soul, and to whom I owe more happiness and pleasure than almost any one who ever walked this earth has felt or could imagine — and it is you who made me guilty towards that man ! that thought sickens my soul ; I turn away from it. I wish to calm myself, and,