t make death beautiful. So do not
lament, my dear. Say often to yourself, 'There were two good
creatures, two beautiful creatures, who both died for me
ungrudgingly, and who adored me.' Keep a memory in your heart of
Coralie and Esther, and go your way and prosper. Do you recollect
the day when you pointed out to me a shriveled old woman, in a
melon-green bonnet and a puce wrapper, all over black
grease-spots, the mistress of a poet before the Revolution, hardly
thawed by the sun though she was sitting against the wall of the
Tuileries and fussing over a pug--the vilest of pugs? She had had
footmen and carriages, you know, and a fine house! And I said to
you then, 'How much better to be dead at thirty!'--Well, you
thought I was melancholy, and you played all sorts of pranks to
amuse me, and between two kisses I said, 'Every day some pretty
woman leaves the play before it is over!'--And I do not want to
see the last piece; that is all.

"You must think me a great chatterbox; but this is my last
effusion. I write as if I were talking to you, and I like to talk
cheerfully. I have always had a horror of a dressmaker pitying
herself. You know I knew how to die decently once before, on my
return from that fatal opera-ball where the men said I had been a
prostitute.

"No, no, my dear love, never give this portrait to any one! If you
could know with what a gush of love I have sat losing myself in
your eyes, looking at them with rapture during a pause I allowed
myself, you would feel as you gathered up the affection with which
I have tried to overlay the ivory, that the soul of your little
pet is indeed there.

"A dead woman craving alms! That is a funny idea.--Come, I must
learn to lie quiet in my grave.

"You have no idea how heroic my death would seem to some fools if
they could know Nucingen last night offered me two millions of
francs if I would love him as I love you. He will be handsomely
robbed when he hears that I have kept my word and died of him. I
tried all I could still to breathe the air you breathe. I said to
the fat scoundrel, 'Do you want me to love you as you wish? To
promise even that I will never see Lucien again?'--'What must I
do?' he asked.--'Give me the two millions for him.'--You should
have seen his face! I could have laughed, if it had not been so
tragical for me.

"'Spare yourself the trouble of refusing,' said I;