The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives
its epistolary provender from all hands.
There is also the fatal invention of the General Delivery. A lover
finds in the world a hundred charitable persons, male and female, who,
for a slight consideration, will slip the billets-doux into the
amorous and intelligent hand of his fair mistress.
A correspondence is a variable as Proteus. There are sympathetic inks.
A young celibate has told us in confidence that he has written a
letter on the fly-leaf of a new book, which, when the husband asked
for it of the bookseller, reached the hands of his mistress, who had
been prepared the evening before for this charming article.
A woman in love, who fears her husband's jealousy, will write and read
billets-doux during the time consecrated to those mysterious
occupations during which the most tyrannical husband must leave her
alone.
Moreover, all lovers have the art of arranging a special code of
signals, whose arbitrary import it is difficult to understand. At a
ball, a flower placed in some odd way in the hair; at the theatre, a
pocket handkerchief unfolded on the front of the box; rubbing the
nose, wearing a belt of a particular color, putting the hat on one
side, wearing one dress oftener than another, singing a certain song
in a concert or touching certain notes on the piano; fixing the eyes
on a point agreed; everything, in fact, from the hurdy-gurdy which
passes your windows and goes away if you open the shutter, to the
newspaper announcement of a horse for sale--all may be reckoned as
correspondence.
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