Your messenger I have kept, and I have entertained him well. I looked at
him a little narrowly at his first coming, thinking perhaps he might be
a gentleman of yours, but I soon found that he was not such, and that he
bore no disguise, but was a plain rider of your household. I put him in
good quarters by the Hunting Stables. He has had nothing to do but to
await my resolution, which is now at last taken, and which you receive
in this.
But how shall I begin, or how express to you what not distance but a
slow and bitter conclusion of the mind has done?
I shall not return to Meudon. I shall not see the woods, the summer
woods turning to autumn, nor follow the hunt, nor take pleasure again in
what is still the best of Europe at Versailles. And now that I have said
it, you must read it so; for I am unalterably determined. Believe me, it
is something much more deep than courtesy which compels me to give you
my reasons for this final and irrevocable doom.
We were children together. Though we leant so lightly in our
conversations of this spring upon all we knew in common, I know your age
and all your strong early experience--and you know mine. Your mother
will recall that day's riding when I came back from my first leave and
you were home, not, I think, for good, from the convent. A fixed
domestic habit blinded her, so that she could then still see in us no
more than two children; yet I was proud of my sword, and had it on, and
you that day were proud of a beauty which could no longer be hidden even
from yourself; I would then have sacrificed, and would now, all I had or
was or had or am to have made that beauty immortal.
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