To Mademoiselle Jacques
MY DEAR THÉRÈSE:
“I start in two hours for the country, with the Comte de S—— and Prince D——. There will be youth and beauty in the party, so I am assured. I promise and swear to you to do nothing foolish and to drink no champagne—without reproaching myself bitterly therefor! What can you expect? I should certainly have preferred to lounge in your great studio, and talk nonsense in your little lilac salon; but since you are in retirement with your thirty-six provincial cousins, you will certainly not notice my absence the day after to-morrow; you will have the delicious music of the Anglo-American accent throughout the evening. Ah! so the excellent Monsieur Palmer’s name is Dick? I thought that Dick was the familiar diminutive of Richard! To be sure, in the matter of languages, French is the only one I can claim to know.
“As for the portrait, let us say no more about it. You are a thousand times too motherly, my dear Thérèse, to think of my interests to the detriment of your own. Although you have a fine clientèle, I know that your generosity does not permit you to save money, and that a few bank-notes will be much more suitably placed in your hands than in mine. You will employ them in making others happy, and I should toss them on a card-table, as you say.
“Moreover, I have never been less in the mood for painting. One needs for that two things which you have, reflection and inspiration; I shall never have the first, and I have had the second. So I am disgusted with it, as with an old witch who has exhausted me by galloping me across fields on the skinny back of her horse Apocalypse. I see clearly enough what I lack; with all respect to your good sense, I have not yet lived hard enough, and I am going away for three days or a week with Madame Reality, in the guise of divers nymphs of the Opéra corps de ballet. I hope, on my return, to be a most accomplished, that is to say, a most blasé and most reasonable man of the world.
“Your friend,
“LAURENT.”