ouble." The days
of _ennui_ certainly count for years, and give us gray hairs before we
are five-and-twenty. But you know I cannot pity you. You _would_ marry
an English girl because she looked pretty sipping her tea. I told you
beforehand that you would be miserable with her, once shut up in the
country. The episode of Toniello is enchanting. What people!--to put him
in prison for a little bit of _chiasso_ like that! You should never have
taken his bright eyes and his mandoline to that doleful and damp land of
precisians. What will they do with him? And what can you do without him?
The weather here is admirable. There are numbers of people one knows. It
is really very amusing. I go and dance every night, and then we
play,--usually "bac," or roulette. Everybody is very merry. We all talk
often of you, and say the _De Profundis_ over you, my poor Piero. Why
did your cruel destiny make you see a _Sainte-Nitouche_ drinking tea
under a lime-tree? I suppose _Sainte-Nitouche_ would not permit it, else
why not exchange the humid greenness of your matrimonial prison for the
Rue des Planches and the Casino?

* * * * *

_From the Prince di San Zenone, Coombe-Bysset, to the Duchessa
dell'Aquila Fulva, Trouville._

_Carissima mia_,--

I have set light to the fuse! I have frankly declared that if I do not
go out of this watery atmosphere and verdant Bastile I shall perish of
sheer inanition and exhaustion. The effect of the declaration was for
the moment such that I hoped, actually hoped, that she was going to get
into a passion. It would have been so refreshing! After twenty-six days
of dumb acquiescence and silent tears, it would have been positively
delightful to have had a storm. But no! For an instant she looked at me
with unspeakable reproach; the next her dove's eyes filled, she sighed,
she left the room! Do they not say that feather beds offer an admirable
defence against bullets? I feel like the bullet which has been fired
into the feather bed. The feather bed is victorious. I see the Rue des
Planches through the perspective of the watery atmosphere; the Casino
seems to smile at me from the end of the interminable lime-tree avenue,
which is one of the chief beauties of this house; but, alas! they are
both as far off as if Trouville were in the moon. What could they do to
me if I came alone? Do you know what they could do? I have not the
remotest idea, but I imagine something frightful. The