ess
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
water of Chatel-Guyon!