First Part Chapter 22

LOUISE TO FELIPE

I am not pleased with you. If you did not cry over Racine's
Berenice, and feel it to be the most terrible of tragedies, there is
no kinship in our souls; we shall never get on together, and had
better break off at once. Let us meet no more. Forget me; for if I do
not have a satisfactory reply, I shall forget you. You will become M.
le Baron de Macumer for me, or rather you will cease to be at all.

Yesterday at Mme. d'Espard's you had a self-satisfied air which
disgusted me. No doubt, apparently, about your conquest! In sober
earnest, your self-possession alarms me. Not a trace in you of the
humble slave of your first letter. Far from betraying the
absent-mindedness of a lover, you polished epigrams! This is not the
attitude of a true believer, always prostrate before his divinity.

If you do not feel me to be the very breath of your life, a being
nobler than other women, and to be judged by other standards, then I
must be less than a woman in your sight. You have roused in me a
spirit of mistrust, Felipe, and its angry mutterings have drowned the
accents of tenderness. When I look back upon what has passed between
us, I feel in truth that I have a right to be suspicious. For know,
Prime Minister of all the Spains, that I have reflected much on the
defenceless condition of our sex. My innocence has held a torch, and
my fingers are not burnt. Let me repeat to you, then, what my youthful
experience taught me.