Читать книгу Letters to an Unknown - Prosper Merimee - Страница 12

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Lady M. told me last night that you were going to be married. This being so, burn my letters. I shall burn yours, and then good-bye. You already know my principles on this question. They do not allow me to continue in friendly relations with a married woman whom I knew as a young girl, with a widow whom I knew as a married woman. I have observed that when the civil status of a woman has changed, one’s relations with her have changed also, and always for the worse. In brief, right or wrong, I can not endure that my friends should marry. Therefore, if you are going to be married, let us forget each other. I beg of you not to have recourse to one of your usual evasions, but to answer me frankly.

I declare that since September 28 I have suffered disappointments and vexations of every description. Your marriage was only another of the fatalities that were to fall on me.

One night not long ago, being unable to sleep, I reviewed in my mind all the vexations which have overwhelmed me during the last fortnight, and I found for them all but one compensation, which was your amiable letter, and your equally amiable promise to make me a sketch. Yet now I wish I could stab the sun, as the Andalusians say.

Mariquita de mi vida, (let me call you so until your marriage), I had a superb stone, finely cut, brilliant, sparkling, in every point perfect. I believed it to be a diamond, which I would not have exchanged for that of the Grand Mogul. Not so at all! It turns out to be but an imitation. A friend of mine, who is a chemist, has just analysed it for me. Fancy my disappointment. I have spent a great deal of time thinking of this imitation diamond, and of my good fortune in having found it. Now I must spend as much time, and more even, in persuading myself that it was not a genuine stone.

All this is only a parable. I took dinner the other evening with the false diamond, and made but a surly appearance. When I am angry I am rather skilful with the rhetorical figure called irony, and so I extolled the good qualities of the diamond in my most bombastic style and with frigid composure. I do not know, I am sure, why I tell you all this, especially since we are soon to forget each other. Meanwhile, I love you still, and commend myself to your prayers—“nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” etc.

Next Friday your picture will leave by mail, and should certainly reach London by Sunday. You might send for it Tuesday at Mr. V.’s, Pall-Mall.

Forgive the insanity of this letter; my mind is distracted with gloomy thoughts.