Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/168

1774] Filled it with, trouble and tears ! added to a frightful misfortune the torture of remorse ! made me detest every instant of my life ! and yet you have bound me to it by an interest that consumes my heart and which, twenty times a day, presents itself to my thoughts as a crime! Ah! mon Dieu! I am guilty, yet heaven is witness that nothing was dearer to my heart than virtue — and to say that it was not you who led me astray! What? you believe that it was I alone who cast myself into that abyss? I am not to impute to you either my faults or my misfortunes? Oh! I wanted to expiate them, I saw the termination of my woe; in hating you I became stronger than death. By what fatality, and why have I returned to you? Why did the fear of your illness thus enervate my soul? Why do you rend me and comfort me at the same moment? Why this fatal mixture of pleasure and pain, of balm and poison ?

All this acts with too much violence on a soul that passion and misfortune have overwrought ; all this is completing the destruction of a body exhausted by illness and loss of sleep. Alas! I said to you, in the extremity of my trouble, "I know not if it be you or death that I implore;" it is by you, or by death that I must be relieved, or cured forever — all the world, all Nature can do nothing for me.

Alas ! does there remain to me one prayer, one desire, one regret, one thought of which you and M. de Mora are not the object? Mon ami, I thought my soul extinct ; I told you this and I found sweetness in such repose. But ah, good God! how fugitive that feeling was ! it was only the effect of opium prolonged. Well! I will recover my reason or I shall lose it wholly. But tell me, how is it possible that I have not yet spoken to you of yourself, that I have not said how I fear a return of your fever ; and that I hope for news to-day as the post is not in? Adieu, mon ami; your