"I can neither see nor speak to you, but I am not forbidden to write. Will you permit me? Will you dare to reply to the stranger? Had I this happiness, I might find your letters, and place mine in a book you could leave every evening on the bench near the water. I love you passionately--madly--wildly: I am conquered--my power is crushed. My activity, my zeal, my enthusiasm for the work to which I am devoted, all, even the feeling of duty, is gone, unless you love me. Bound by oath to strange and terrible duties, by the gift and abandonment of my will, I float between the idea of infamy and suicide: I cannot think you really love me, and that, at the present moment, distrust and fear have not effaced your passion for me. Could it be otherwise? I am to you but a shadow, only the dream of a night--the illusion of a moment. Well, to win your love, I am ready, twenty times a day, to sacrifice my honor, to betray my word, and sully my conscience by perjury. If you contrived to escape from this prison, I would follow you to the end of the world, were I to expiate, by a life of shame and remorse, the intoxication of your presence, though only for a day, and to hear you say once, though but once, 'I love you.' Yet, if you refuse to unite yourself to the Invisibles, if the oaths which soon are to be exacted from you prove repugnant, it will be forbidden me ever to see you. I will not obey, for I cannot--no, I have suffered enough--I have toiled, sufficiently toiled, in the service of man. If you be not the recompense of my labor, I will have nothing more to do with it. I destroy myself by returning to earth, its laws, its habits. Take pity, take pity on me. Tell me not that you do not love me. I cannot support the blow--I will not, cannot believe it. If I did, I must die."
Consuelo read the note amid the noise of guns, bombs, and fireworks, the explosion of which she did not hear. Engrossed by what she read, she experienced, without being aware of it, the impression produced on sensitive minds by the detonation of powder, and in general, by all violent noises. This principally influences the imagination, when it does not act physically on a weak, unhealthy body, by producing painful tremors. It exalts, on the other hand, the mind and senses of brave and well-constituted persons. It awakens even in the minds of some women, intrepid instincts, ideas of strife, and vague regrets that they are not men. In fine, there is a well-marked accent which makes us find an amount of quasi-musical enjoyment in the voice of the rushing torrent, in the roar of the breaking wave, in the roll of thunder; this accent of anger, wrath, menace and pride--this voice of power, so to say, is found in the roar of artillery, in the whistling of balls, and in the countless convulsions of the atmosphere which imitate the shock of battle in artificial fire-works.
