Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/30

Rh my compatriots seem born beneath the snows of Lapland." And it was from Madrid that he wrote it ! He found her comparable to none but a Peruvian, daughter of the Sun, " To love and suffer," she cries, " Heaven or Hell ; to that I would vow myself ; it is that I would feel ; that is the climate I desire to inhabit;" and she pities the women who live and vegetate in a milder air and flirt their fans around her. "I have known only the climate of Hell, rarely that of Heaven." " Ah ! my God ! " she says again, " how natural passion is to me, and how foreign is reason ! Mon ami, never did any one reveal herself with such abandonment." It is this abandonment, this total unre- serve which is the interest and the excuse of the mental situation, the sincerest and the most deplorable that ever betrayed itself to the eye.

This situation of soul is so visibly deplorable that we may look upon it, I think, without danger ; so inherent is the sense of malady, so plainly do delirium, frenzy, agony disclose them- selves pell-mell. While admiring a nature capable of this powerful manner of feeling, we are tempted as we read to pray that Heaven would turn from us and from those we love so invincible a fatality, so terrible a thunderbolt. I shall try to note the course of this passion, as much, at least, as it is possible to note down that which was irregularity and contradiction itself.

Before the journey of M. de Guibert to Germany, Mile, de Lespinasse loved him, but had not yielded to her love. She admired him, she was filled with enthusiasm, already she suffered cruelly and made poison of everything. He returns, she intoxicates herself, she yields ; then follows remorse ; she judges him correctly ; she sees with terror his indifference ; she sees him as he is — a man of flourish, of vanity, of suc- cess ; not a man for intimacy, having, above all, a need for