Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/336

Rh friends will some day die as she has died, and I wish her to live in the future; I wish that after me some tender soul, reading this funeral dirge, may regret that he never knew her, and pity my misfortune in surviving her.

Eliza related to me several times the first years of her life. All that we see in our theatres, all that we read in our novels, how cold and barren they are beside that narrative! We must penetrate the interior of families to see the great scenes of passion and human calamities. Our writers mar them with their imagination; none but their actors and their victims can picture them. Eliza was born under the auspices of love and misfortune. Her mother was a woman of a great name, living separate from her husband. She brought up this daughter publicly, as though she had the right to acknowledge her as her own, and she kept from her knowledge the mystery of her birth. But often, in secret, she bathed her with tears ; she seemed, in redoubling her tenderness, to wish to compensate her for the fatal gift she had made her of life. She loaded her with caresses and benefits. She gave her, herself, the first of all benefits, an excellent education; it was soon to be all that remained of her. She died almost suddenly, and at the moment when she was about to endeavour to give her daughter the social position that the laws might perhaps have granted her. Eliza was* left abandoned to relatives who soon were no other than persecutors. They told her what she was ; from the position of a cherished daughter she descended, suddenly, and in the same house, to that of orphan and stranger. Disdainful and brutal pity took charge of the unfortunate girl, until then so tenderly cared for by remorse and by natural love ; she lived, because she was then of an age when unhappiness does not kill, or, to speak more truly, when there is no such thing as unhappiness.