e secret of my
desk, and then he will not look for it. And even if he finds it
after my death, I fear nothing.

Did you ever stop to think of all the love letters that have been
found after death? I have been thinking of this for a long time,
and that is the reason I decided to ask you for my letters.

Think that never, do you understand, never, does a woman burn, tear
or destroy the letters in which it is told her that she is loved.
That is our whole life, our whole hope, expectation and dream.
These little papers which bear our name in caressing terms are
relics which we adore; they are chapels in which we are the saints.
Our love letters are our titles to beauty, grace, seduction, the
intimate vanity of our womanhood; they are the treasures of our
heart. No, a woman does not destroy these secret and delicious
archives of her life.

But, like everybody else, we die, and then--then these letters
are found! Who finds them? The husband. Then what does he do?
Nothing. He burns them.

Oh, I have thought a great deal about that! Just think that every
day women are dying who have been loved; every day the traces and
proofs of their fault fall into the hands of their husbands, and
that there is never a scandal, never a duel.

Think, my dear, of what a man's heart is. He avenges himself on a
living woman; he fights with the man who has dishonored her, kills
him while she lives, because, well, why? I do not know exactly why.
But, if, after her death, he finds similar proofs, he burns them and
no one is the wiser, and he continues to shake hands with the friend
of the dead woman, and feels quite at ease that these letters should
not have fallen into strange hands, and that they are destroyed.

Oh, how many men I know among my friends who must have burned such
proofs, and who pretend to know nothing, and yet who would have
fought madly had they found them when she was still alive! But she
is dead. Honor has changed. The tomb is the boundary of conjugal
sinning.

Therefore, I can safely keep our letters, which, in your hands,
would be a menace to both of us. Do you dare to say that I am not
right?

I love you and kiss you.

I raised my eyes to the portrait of Aunt Rose, and as I looked at her
severe, wrinkled face, I thought of all those women's souls which we do
not know, and which we suppose to be so diffe