Death seemed to me a sweet relief, and I made my way toward it without complaint. Oh, the thought of being alone at the Carmelite convent of Blois, the terror of taking my vows in that place without a prologue like Mademoiselle de la Vallière’s,[3] and without my Renée! It was an affliction, a mortal affliction. That unchanging existence, in which every hour brings a duty, a prayer, a task so perfectly identical that no matter where you may be in the world you know just what a Carmelite is doing at any hour of the day or night; that horrible existence in which it matters not that the things around us are or are not, had for us become an existence of the greatest variety: our soaring spirits knew no boundaries, fantasy had given us the key to its kingdoms. By turns, we each made a charming hippogriff[4] for the other, the livelier of us rousing the sleepier, and our souls frolicked in tandem as they laid claim to the world that had been forbidden us. Even in the Lives of the Saints we could find an aid to the understanding of the most secret things! The day your sweet company was stolen from me, I became what a Carmelite is in our eyes, a modern-day Danaïd who does not seek to fill a bottomless barrel but rather, day after day, hoists an empty bucket from I know not what well, hoping to find it full. My aunt had no idea of our secret inner life. She could not understand my weariness of existence, she who has made a heavenly world for herself in the two arpents of her convent. If it is to be embraced at our age, the religious life demands an excessive simplicity that you and I, my doe, do not have, or the sort of burning devotion that makes my aunt so sublime. My aunt sacrificed herself for the sake of a cherished brother, but who can sacrifice herself for the sake of strangers, or of ideas?

For what will soon be two weeks, I have had so many free-spirited words trapped inside me, so many meditations buried deep in my heart, so many observations to express and stories to tell that can only be told to you, that without the stopgap of written confidences standing in for our precious chats, I would suffocate. How vitally we require the life of the heart! I begin my chronicle this morning imagining that yours has already been started, that very soon I will live in the heart of your beautiful valley of Gémenos,[5] of which I know only what you have told me, just as you will live in Paris, of which you know only what we dreamt of together.

Well then, my lovely child, on a morning that will remain forever signaled by a pink marker in the book of my life, my grandmother’s last valet, Philippe, came from Paris with a lady’s maid to take me away. When my aunt summoned me to her room and told me the news, I stood speechless with joy; I could only stare in disbelief.

“My child,” she said to me in her hoarse voice, “I can see that you do not regret leaving me, but this is not the final farewell. We shall see each other again. God has marked your brow with the sign of the elect; you have the sort of pride that can lead just as well to hell as to heaven, but you are too noble to descend! I know you better than you know yourself: passion will not be for you what it is for ordinary women.”

She gently drew me to her and kissed my brow, stamping it with the flame that devours her, that has dimmed the azure of her pupils, wrinkled her flaxen temples, left her eyelids drooping and her beautiful face sallow. She gave me gooseflesh.

I kissed her hands, then answered, “Dear aunt, if your wonderful kindness has not made me find in your Paraclete[6] a place salubrious to the body and comforting to the heart, I will have to shed so many tears before I return to it that you would never wish to see me again. I will come back to this place only when I have been betrayed by a Louis XIV of my own, and if ever I catch hold of one, only death will tear him from my arms! I fear no Madame de Montespan.”

“Go on, then, you mad girl,” she said with a smile, “do not leave those silly ideas here, take them away with you, and know that you are more a Montespan than a La Vallière.”

I gave her a kiss. That poor, frail woman could not resist seeing me to the carriage, her gaze fixed now on the paternal coat of arms, now on me.

Night came upon me unawares in Beaugency, lost as I was in a bemusement provoked by that singular farewell. What would I find in this world I so longed for? As it turned out, the first thing I found was no one to welcome me. All the preparations I had made in my heart were for naught. My mother was at the Bois de Boulogne, my father at the Council of State; I was told that my brother the Duke de Rhétoré comes home only to dress for dinner. I was shown to my rooms by Miss Griffith (she has claws)[7] and Philippe.

Those rooms once belonged to my beloved grandmother the Princess de Vaurémont, to whom I owe some manner of fortune, of which no one has ever told me. In the lines that follow, you will feel all the sadness that seized me on entering that place hallowed by my memories. Everything was just as she left it! I was to sleep in the bed that she died in. I sat on the edge of her chaise longue and wept, little caring that I was not alone, remembering the many times I had sat at her knees, the better to hear her words, seeing her face swathed in discolored lace, emaciated by age as much as by the torments of her final illness. I thought I could still feel the warmth she imparted to that room. How is it possible that Mademoiselle Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu should be obliged, like a peasant girl, to sleep in her mother’s bed, almost on the very day she died? For to me that princess, who died in 1817, might have expired only the day before. I found the room cluttered with things that had no place there, proving how little those occupied with the kingdom’s affairs care for their own, and how rarely they thought of that noble woman once she was dead, she who will be remembered as one of the truly great women of the eighteenth century. Philippe seemed to understand the reason for my tears. He told me that the princess had bequeathed her furniture to me in her will, and that my father had still not undertaken to erase the ravages of the Revolution from the house’s grand apartments. I rose to my feet, and Philippe opened the door to the little salon that gives on to the reception room. I found it in the dilapidated state I knew so well: no precious paintings set into the walls above the doors but only bare beams; the marble mantels broken; the mirrors pulled down.