from M. de Luxembourg, in which he says he recollects our walks with the
greatest pleasure; especially, adds he, when in the evening we entered
the court and did not find there the traces of carriages. The rake being
every morning drawn over the gravel to efface the marks left by the coach
wheels, I judged by the number of ruts of that of the persons who had
arrived in the afternoon.

This year, 1761, completed the heavy losses this good man had suffered
since I had had the honor of being known to him. As if it had been
ordained that the evils prepared for me by destiny should begin by the
man to whom I was most attached, and who was the most worthy of esteem.
The first year he lost his sister, the Duchess of Villeroy; the second,
his daughter, the Princess of Robeck; the third, he lost in the Duke of
Montmorency his only son; and in the Comte de Luxembourg, his grandson,
the last two supporters of the branch of which he was, and of his name.
He supported all these losses with apparent courage, but his heart
incessantly bled in secret during the rest of his life, and his health
was ever after upon the decline. The unexpected and tragical death of
his son must have afflicted him the more, as it happened immediately
after the king had granted him for his child, and given him the promise
for his grandson, the reversion of the commission he himself then held of
the captain of the Gardes de Corps. He had the mortification to see the
last, a most promising young man, perish by degrees from the blind
confidence of the mother in the physician, who giving the unhappy youth
medicines for food, suffered him to die of inanition. Alas! had my
advice been taken, the grandfather and the grandson would both still have
been alive. What did not I say and write to the marechal, what
remonstrances did I make to Madam de Montmorency, upon the more than
severe regimen, which, upon the faith of physicians, she made her son
observe! Madam de Luxembourg, who thought as I did, would not usurp the