London, April 4, 1808.
I sat yesterday at Mrs. Dawson’s between Baron Montalembert and a young man about two and twenty, who, hearing me speak French fluently to my neighbour who knew not English, and seeing I was applied to on Continental matters, was suddenly seized with such a desire to dazzle and enchant me from the idea that I was a foreigner or professed traveller, as was very amusing to everybody. He began immediately to talk French, to say he would go to Paris the hour there was a peace, to sigh over the charms of archduchesses and the fascinating manners of Poles, to call foreign princes by their names—the Radziwills, the Mecklenburgs—to say what pleasant houses they kept, and to repeat such French bon-mots as are in every collection of anecdotes, at the same time trying to talk over such parts of Germany as I only had seen, and this not in a whisper, but so as to preclude the conversation of others. Mrs. D. says it was a Continental fit, assumed entirely for poor me.
By the bye, I saw a curious instance of the sameness of French character in a marchande de toilette whom Miss A. employs. She came from a provincial town, has been fifteen years out of France, and yet is precisely a second-hand inferior Mad. Canot. After Miss A. had given her three guineas for two little quizzical things, bought at one of the worst shops in the Palais Royal for a petit écu, she packed up, saying, ‘Pour moi je serai toujours pauvre, car je déteste les gains excessifs. Je ne puis pas souffrir les grands profits.’
Now I am wound up for letter-writing, I am going to compose one to Mrs. ——. You know, some letters we write; some write themselves (as ours to each other); and others we compose. Thank heaven, there are none which we invent, though I fear this last branch is in several hands.
TO THE SAME.
London, April 6, 1808.
I have read Mrs. Grant’s Letters,[44] and am charmed with them, but they were very unfit for me, as we were both wounded in the same vital part. I am now certain that my wound will never close, though it only throbs and pains at intervals. But every agitation revives in me the sense of my loss; even those of a pleasurable kind. I am like a man who bears in his breast the weapon which has wounded him, and who, when quite still, does not always feel it, but the least movement makes it a torment. I think if I could have seen my angel’s vivid smile to-day it would have calmed all my anxiety. He was certainly sent to give me an idea of celestial happiness. There is a source of bitterness in my love for you; for one of us must survive the other; but I used to think with a certain satisfaction of his closing my eyes and living happily afterwards, which I can scarcely hope for you. Then ‘Hope waits upon the flowery prime,’ and that which we think we shall see improving for years acquires almost a kind of immortality in our eyes. I give up all idea of being more consoled than I am, though I will not oppose the designs of Providence; but as my feelings interfere with no duty, and assist in giving me that indifference we ought to have for the pomps, and vanities, and follies of the world, I rather think it would be wrong to try and repress what I know has made me less faulty than I am by nature. When our Saviour said ‘Weep not’ (which is the text I most often recollect) to the widow who had lost her son, He intended to restore him to her once more in this life, as He afterwards did. Besides, I cannot possibly in any way hope you will never be absent from me; and I expected to have enjoyed his constant company and constant happiness for ten long years, of which only four and a half would have now expired. Adieu! I know I grieve you a little; but I trust it does your mind no injury to recall it now and then to what it is useful sometimes to think on; and I prefer your feeling a momentary pang, to the least chance of your forgetting him, which I should think a faint shadow of losing him again.