Many thanks for the three last volumes of Montaigne that I return.
The visit of your ever lovable family yesterday evening has done me much good. My God! how I love them all from the Grandmother and the father to the smallest child.
The reply of Madame Brillon was in kindred terms:
Saturday, 18th November, 1780.
There would be many little things indeed to criticise in your logic, which you fortify so well, my dear Papa. "When I was a young man," you say, "and enjoyed the favors of the sex more freely than at present, I had no gout." "Therefore," one might reply to this, "when I threw myself out of the window, I did not break my leg." Therefore, you could have the gout without having deserved it, and you could have well deserved it, as I believe, and not have had it.
If this last argument is not so brilliant as the others, it is clear and sure; what is neither clear nor sure are the arguments of philosophers who insist that everything that happens in the world is necessary to the general movement of the universal machine. I believe that the machine would go neither better nor worse if you did not have the gout, and if I were forever rid of my nervous troubles.
I do not see what help, more or less, these little incidents can give to the wheels that turn this world at random, and I know that my little machine goes very much the worse for them. What I know very well besides, is that pain sometimes becomes mistress of reason, and that patience alone can overcome these two nuisances. I have as much of it as I can, and I advise you, my friend, to have the same amount. When frosts have cast a gloom over the earth, a bright sun makes us forget them. We are in the midst of frosts, and must wait patiently for this bright sun, and, while waiting for it, amuse ourselves in the moments when weakness and pain leave us some rest. This, my dear Papa, is my logic....
Adieu, my good Papa. My big husband will take my letter to you; he is very happy to be able to go to see you. For me, nothing remains but the faculty of loving my friends. You surely do not doubt that I shall do my best for you, even to Christian charity, that is to say, with the exception of your Christian charity.
She writes a brief letter to Franklin on New Year's Day of 1781:
If I had a good head and good legs—if, in short, I had everything that I lack,—I should have come, like a good daughter, to wish a happy New Year to the best of papas. But I have only a very tender heart to love him well, and a rather bad pen to scribble him that this year, as well as last year, and all the years of my life, I shall love him, myself alone, as much as all the others that love him, put together.