Free Visions of Isabelle by William Bayer

lonely night.
Write me more–pages more. I feel most fortunate. I never expected that my pathetic request, hidden in the columns among all those other pleas of unhappy people, would find the eye of one so tender and humane.
Eugène

Dear Eugène:
I am most touched by your letter. It is imperative that we be frank. Only then can we achieve the intimacy we both so clearly need. So I shall write you tonight about an unhappiness of my own, how a violent young man of enormous charm seduced me, lifted me to heights of romantic bliss, and then deceived me as cruelly as any heroine in any story I have ever read. But first let me tell you how I imagined you when I wrote you the first time. Thinking of you, a lonely young French officer stationed in the Sahara, caused me to break out of the firm wrappings of my reserve. I imagined a man tall and lean and deeply tanned by sun, wearing a tan kepi and desert shorts which showed off his strong young legs. I expected, too, a roughness that concealed a poetic nature. I imagined a man who wrote crude verse which he kept hidden beneath his linens in the bottom of his trunk.
Well, we misjudged each other. I can see now that you really are an excellent poet, that poetry is engraved upon your soul. And, my dear Eugène, you have misjudged me, too. I am far less tender than you think, about as soft and feminine as a mountain oak. But enough of that–let me tell you of my own unhappiness.
Isabelle

    The correspondence between Isabelle Eberhardt and Eugène Letord grew over the summer months. Each wrote lengthy letters and spent hours on replies. After the first exchange of confidences, she wrote him of the books she'd read, thoughts that flashed through her mind, adventures of which she dreamed. She told him more about her family and introduced him to Augustin who began to enclose notes of his own.
    Eugène, in turn, corrected their misconceptions about desert life, but in his minute descriptions of the little settlements he visited, the oases, the inner workings of the Moslem faith, there grew in Isabelle and Augustin a vision even more seductive and exotic than any they had held in the past. Their dreams of escape, which had always centered on the south, were now concentrated on North Africa. Through the eyes of Eugène Letord they felt they knew it well, could feel its dry sun, could taste the acrid water of its closely guarded wells.
    With each other now they began to speak more openly of escape. They decided, finally, to write to Letord and solicit his aid. Their letter went unanswered for many weeks. When Letord finally did reply it was not, as they'd assumed, to cut them off, but to apologize for being unable to help.
    He'd been transferred to an even more remote garrison, was isolated except for mail which reached him only every other month. He begged them to wait. He felt that the time was not yet right for them, that "Nadia" was still too young to break away and that Augustin must stay with her, not leave her alone in the "evil garden." They wrote back at once expressing their gratitude. They felt, for the first time, that they had an ally in the outside world.
    The autumn was going well, it seemed to Isabelle, until one night, angry with Augustin for refusing to explain to her his even more frequent and mysterious absences from the house, she rifled his drawers and discovered that he was carrying on a secret correspondence with someone else. The man's name was Vivicorsi, he lived in Trieste, and as she read his letters she realized with horror that with him Augustin was plotting an escape of his own.

    T he evening of October 12 Augustin is dressing in his room. A knock on the door.
    "Who is it?"
    "Isabelle."
    "Just a minute."
    Quickly he gathers up all the incriminating materials that cover his bed: roll of money, packets of opium, bundle of letters from Madeleine Joliet. He stuffs them into a musette bag, then heaves the bag into his wardrobe.
    "What's going on in