THE PRÉSIDENTE DE TOURVEL TO THE VICOMTE DE VALMONT
DOUBTLESS, MONSIEUR, AFTER WHAT passed yesterday, you will not expect me to receive you again; nor, doubtless, are you at all desirous that I should! This note, therefore, is written less with the intention of begging you to come no more, than to request you to return the letters, which should never have existed, and which, if they may have interested you for a moment, as proofs of the infatuation you had occasioned, can only be indifferent to you now that this is dissipated, and that they only express a sentiment which you have destroyed.
I admit and confess that I am to blame for having shown in you a confidence of which so many before me have been victims; in that I accuse myself alone: but I believed, at least, that I had not deserved to be handed over by you to insult and contempt. I believed that, in sacrificing all for you, and losing for you alone my rights to my own and others’ esteem, I could, nevertheless, expect to be judged by you not more severely than by the public, whose opinion still discriminates, by an immense interval, between the frail woman and the woman who is depraved.
These wrongs, which would be wrongs in the case of anybody, are the only ones I shall mention. I shall be silent on those of love; your heart would not understand mine. Adieu, Monsieur.
PARIS, 15TH NOVEMBER, 17–.