r her daughter, and against you. During the
fifteen years that I have observed society, I have never yet seen
a mother who, under such circumstances, abandons her daughter.
This indulgence seems to be an inheritance transmitted in the
female line. What man can blame it? Some copyist of the Civil
code, perhaps, who sees formulas only in the place of feelings.

As for your present position, the dissipation into which the life
of a fashionable woman cast you, and your own easy nature,
possibly your vanity, have opened the way for your wife and her
mother to get rid of you by this ruin so skilfully contrived. From
all of which you will conclude, my good friend, that the mission
you entrusted to me, and which I would all the more faithfully
fulfil because it amused me, is, necessarily, null and void. The
evil you wish me to prevent is accomplished,--"consummatum est."

Forgive me, dear friend, if I write to you, as you say, a la de
Marsay on subjects which must seem to you very serious. Far be it
from me to dance upon the grave of a friend, like heirs upon that
of a progenitor. But you have written to me that you mean to act
the part of a man, and I believe you; I therefore treat you as a
man of the world, and not as a lover. For you, this blow ought to
be like the brand on the shoulder of a galley-slave, which flings
him forever into a life of systematic opposition to society. You
are now freed of one evil; marriage possessed you; it now behooves
you to turn round and possess marriage.

Paul, I am your friend in the fullest acceptation of the word. If
you had a brain in an iron skull, if you had the energy which has
come to you too late, I would have proved my friendship by telling
you things that would have made you walk upon humanity as upon a
carpet. But when I did talk to you guardedly of Parisian
civilization, when I told you in the disguise of fiction some of
the actual adventures of my youth, you regarded them as mere
romance and would not see their bearing. When I told you that
history of a lawyer at the galleys branded for forgery, who
committed the crime to give his wife, adored like yours, an income
of thirty thousand francs, and whom his wife denounced that she
might be rid of him and free to love another man, you exclaimed,
and other fools who were supping with us exclaimed against me.
Well, my dear Paul, you were that lawyer, less the