Mademoiselle,--The admiration for fine works (allowing that my books are such) implies something so lofty and sincere as to protect you from all light jesting, and to justify before the sternest judge the step you have taken in writing to me.
But first I must thank you for the pleasure which such proofs of sympathy afford, even though we may not merit them,--for the maker of verses and the true poet are equally certain of the intrinsic worth of their writings,--so readily does self-esteem lend itself to praise. The best proof of friendship that I can give to an unknown lady in exchange for a faith which allays the sting of criticism, is to share with her the harvest of my own experience, even at the risk of dispelling her most vivid illusions.
Mademoiselle, the noblest adornment of a young girl is the flower of a pure and saintly and irreproachable life. Are you alone in the world? If you are, there is no need to say more. But if you have a family, a father or a mother, think of all the sorrow that might come to them from such a letter as yours addressed to a poet of whom you know nothing personally. All writers are not angels;
they have many defects. Some are frivolous, heedless, foppish, ambitious, dissipated; and, believe me, no matter how imposing innocence may be, how chivalrous a poet is, you will meet with many a degenerate troubadour in Paris ready to cultivate your affection only to betray it. By such a man your letter would be interpreted otherwise than it is by me. He would see a thought that is not in it, which you, in your innocence, have not suspected. There are as many natures as there are writers. I am deeply flattered that you have judged me capable of understanding you; but had you, perchance, fallen upon a hypocrite, a scoffer, one whose books may be melancholy but whose life is a perpetual carnival, you would have found as the result of your generous imprudence an evil-minded man, the frequenter of green-rooms, perhaps a hero of some gay resort. In the bower of clematis where you dream of poets, can you smell the odor of the cigar which drives all poetry from the manuscript?
But let us look still further. How could the dreamy, solitary life you lead, doubtless by the sea-shore, interest a poet, whose mission it is to imagine all, and to paint all? What reality can equal imagination? The young girls of the poets are so ideal that no living daughter of Eve can compete with them. And now tell me, what will you gain,--you, a young girl, brought up to be the virtuous mother of a family,--if you learn to comprehend the terrible agitations of a poet's life in this dreadful capital, which may be defined by one sentence,--the hell in which men love.
If the desire to brighten the monotonous existence of a young girl thirsting for knowledge has led you to take your pen in hand and write to me, has not the step itself the appearance of degradation? What meaning am I to give to your letter? Are you one of a rejected caste, and do you seek a friend far away from you?
Or, are you afflicted with personal ugliness, yet feeling within you a noble soul which can give and receive a confidence? Alas, alas, the conclusion to be drawn is grievous. You have said too much, or too little; you have gone too far, or not far enough.
Either let us drop this correspondence, or, if you continue it, tell me more than in the letter you have now written me.