You may not even now understand, so engrossing is the toilsome and
excited ritual of that rich world at Versailles, how blest you are: your
children are growing round you: your daughters are beginning to reveal
your own beauty, and your sons will show in these next years immediately
before us that temper which in you was a spirit and a height of being,
and in them, men, will show as plain courage. During that long space of
years your house has remained well ordered (it was your husband's
doing). His great fortune and yours have jointly increased: if I may
tell you so, it is a pleasure to all who understand fitness to know that
this is so, and that your lineage and his will hold so great a place in
the State.

As you review those sixteen years you may, if you will--I trust you will
not--recall those occasions when I saw the woods of Meudon and mixed by
chance with your world, and when we renewed the rides which had ended
our childhood. As for me I have not to recall those things. They are,
alas, myself, and beyond them there is nothing that I can call a memory
or a being at all. Nevertheless, as I have told you, I shall not come to
Meudon: I shall not hear again the delightful voices of those many
friends (now in mid-life as am I) who are my equals at Versailles. I
shall not see your face.

I did not take service with the Empire from any pique or folly, but from
a necessity for adventure and for the refounding of my house. It might
have chanced that I should marry: the land demanded an heir. My
impoverishment weighed upon me like an ill deed, for all this belt of
land is dependent upon the old house, which I can with such difficulty
retain and from which I write to-day. I spent all those years in the
service of the Empire (and even of Russia) from no uncertain temper and
from no imaginary quarrel. It is so common or so necessary for men and