I have read Werther, faute de mieux. I still admire it as an eloquent picture of love, which must always enchant those who have not drank at the fountain-head; but I find that the vivid colouring of a great attachment makes all shadows and representations appear at once faint and affected. ‘I have heard the nightingale,’ as the Athenian answered, when he was invited to hear an actor imitate her notes; and for the rest of my life I can never be extremely delighted at what my imagination used formerly to embrace as the height of perfection. I regret the sensibility I wasted on Werther, as a girl, and shall never let it appear in my house now I am a mother of a family. I picked it up at an old lady’s, where my grandfather took me to sit at the corner of the table, while he played his rubber. I borrowed it, brought it home, got it by heart, thought every one who did not admire it enthusiastically had a ‘flinty heart,’ shed torrents of tears over it, adopted its opinions, and laid the first stone of that false taste by which I was for some years subjugated.
I am delighted you went to the Marets. It is of consequence that you, as a prisoner, should be liked; and I wish them to lay all the sauvagerie of our life upon me. Nothing I should like more than their saying, ‘Il est très aimable, et il le seroit encore plus sans sa femme, qui est bien bizarre.’ I wish I could soufflé this to Mad. d’Oisonville for one society, and Mad. Baudot for another, and it would soon be echoed about and be received as one of the dozen established phrases which form the whole conversation of Orleans.
TO THE SAME.
Paris, April, 1804.
After much driving about after General Hardy’s address, I at last obtained it, and drove to his lodgings, with my letter to him in my hand, enclosing a copy of the memorial to General Berthier. I deliberated, should I send up the letter, or see him, when I found he was visible. I recollected your advice to speak, and it decided me. It was dusk, for I could not get the address till late. I walked under a dark and dirty porte cocher, where the carriage could not turn in, and up a very narrow staircase au second. The variety of my thoughts while walking upstairs would fill a page. Will he think me very forward? Shall I be too much embarrassed to speak? Shall I find a levée of young officers? Is General Hardy an impudent dashing young Irishman (for I knew he was our countryman), and will he think it civil to make love to me? I was a little reassured in passing through an ante-room, and seeing a very domestic-looking couvert bourgeois for four people. I walked into the inner room with trepidation, and there, to my comfort, saw two quiet-looking women, a modest and pretty girl, and a tall, fair, pleasing-countenanced man of about fifty, with a very gentle, civil address. He read my letter, looked at my memorial, and from what he promised, and the certainty he seemed to have that he would be the judge of our petition (unless Berthier had some private reason for or against it), I have little, I may say almost no doubt, that our affair is nearly done. Nothing could exceed the civility and appearance of interest I received from the whole party. I trembled so at the beginning I could hardly speak; but, like all constitutionally timid and morally courageous people, after the first instant I was bold as a lion.
TO THE SAME.
Paris, April, 1804.