‘Pray, my little girl, take care, and keep clear from weeds the row of grass I sowed in the round garden, on right hand about ten yards long, but don’t take up anything like grass. And if the two willows which I brought last year 1,000 miles from France are alive yet, give them some water; one is by the hole, and the other by Arthur’s garden—I made little mounds around them. You do not know, my little Bobbin, how much I long to have a walk with you at Bradfield. It is a sad thing I have no letter here; I shall have none till Clermont. I desire a particular account of my farm to be sent here.
‘I have been ill from heat and fatigue, and had a sore throat, but by care and an antiseptic diet I am now, thank God, quite well.
‘What do you think of the French at such a moment as this with a free press? yet in this capital of a great province there is not (publickly) one newspaper to be seen; at a coffee house, where twenty tables for company, not one. What blessed ignorance. The Paris m—— have done the whole, and are the only enlightened part of the K——.
‘Adieu, my dear B.
‘I am, yours affectionately,
‘A. Y.’
[In a note A. Y. writes:]
‘I found Madame la Comtesse de Guerchy a very pleasant, agreeable woman, and among other trifles which occurred at their house was an expedition into the kitchen to teach me to make an omelette, the operation attending which occasioned no little merriment both in the kitchen and parlour. I succeeded pretty well.’[[137]]
1790.—All this summer I was employed in preparing my [French] Travels for the press. In October I had a violent fever, which brought me to the brink of the grave. I made a minute of that illness in the following words: ‘From almost the bed of death, it pleased the Divine Goodness to raise me up, and I remember it was in perfect hardness of heart and free from all true or grateful feelings. I was in a state of blindness and insensibility, on which I reflect with horror and amazement.’[[138]]
I cannot speak of the ingratitude of my heart to God at this period but in the strongest terms, as it amounted to a degree of insensibility quite unaccountable. I fear that not one thought of God ever occurred to me at that time, and I doubt whether [it was so], while one evening I had resumed the habit of prayer, that is, of those formal prayers which an unconverted person may repeat without any real devotion; and yet during my delirium the physician afterwards told me that I one day broke forth into one of the most eloquent and sublime prayers he ever heard, to his utter astonishment.