This article proposes to re-examine what purposes the letters of Pliny the Younger to and about his wife Calpurnia serve in Pliny's quest for lasting fame. It shows that from their hybrid genre of elegiac epistolography to their seemingly intimate themes, these letters' form and content have aims that go beyond flaunting Pliny's perfect private and public life and his numerous talents, and that his writing to an absent wife is as much a pretext as a perfect backdrop to convey messages about himself and about his prose. This article concludes that Pliny stages himself as a lover to show his readers, by a mirror effect, how they should love him, and that his wife's behaviour and their conjugal relationship are ultimately transmuted into templates for the ideal reader's behaviour and the ideal relationship between Pliny and his readership.