ithout doubt, be shameless enough to
make a mother of this by no means desirable being--which is the very
height of the ridiculous.

"July 24th.--I never leave the side of the two unknown widows, whom
I am beginning to know quite well. This country is delightful and our
hotel is excellent. Good season. The treatment is doing me an immense
amount of good.

"July 25th.--Drive in a landau to the lake of Tazenat. An exquisite
and unexpected jaunt decided on at luncheon. We started immediately on
rising from table. After a long journey through the mountains we suddenly
perceived an admirable little lake, quite round, very blue, clear as
glass, and situated at the bottom of an extinct crater. One side of this
immense basin is barren, the other is wooded. In the midst of the trees
is a small house where sleeps a good-natured, intellectual man, a sage
who passes his days in this Virgilian region. He opens his dwelling for
us. An idea comes into my head. I exclaim:

"'Supposing we bathe?'

"'Yes,' they said, 'but costumes.'

"'Bah! we are in the wilderness.'

"And we did bathe!

"If I were a poet, how I would describe this unforgettable vision of
those lissome young forms in the transparency of the water! The high,
sloping sides shut in the lake, motionless, gleaming and round, as a
silver coin; the sun pours into it a flood of warm light; and along the
rocks the fair forms move in the almost invisible water in which the
swimmers seemed suspended. On the sand at the bottom of the lake one
could see their shadows as they moved along.

"July 26th.--Some persons seem to look with shocked and disapproving
eyes at my rapid intimacy with the two fair widows. There are some
people, then, who imagine that life consists in being bored. Everything
that appears to be amusing becomes immediately a breach of good breeding
or morality. For them duty has inflexible and mortally tedious rules.

"I would draw their attention, with all respect, to the fact that duty is
not the same for Mormons, Arabs Zulus, Turks, Englishmen, and Frenchmen,
and that there are very virtuous people among all these nations.

"I will cite a single example. As regards women, duty begins in England
at nine years of age; in France at fifteen. As for me, I take a little of
each people's notion of duty, and of the whole I make a result comparable
to the morality of good King Solomon.

"July 27th.--Good news. I have lost 620 grams in weight. Excellent,
this w