There are times when I reproach myself, when I take myself to task for
my hard heart. Claudine obeys with saintly sweetness. She comes to me,
I tell her to go, she goes, she does not even cry till she is out in
the courtyard. I refuse to see her for a whole week at a time. I tell
her to come at such an hour on Tuesday; and be it midnight or six
o'clock in the morning, ten o'clock, five o'clock, breakfast time,
dinner time, bed time, any particularly inconvenient hour in the day
--she will come, punctual to the minute, beautiful, beautifully dressed,
and enchanting. And she is a married woman, with all the complications
and duties of a household. The fibs that she must invent, the reasons
she must find for conforming to my whims would tax the ingenuity of
some of us! . . . Claudine never wearies; you can always count upon
her. It is not love, I tell her, it is infatuation. She writes to me
every day; I do not read her letters; she found that out, but still
she writes. See here; there are two hundred letters in this casket.
She begs me to wipe my razors on one of her letters every day, and I
punctually do so.
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