much she disliked you ever since she detected you mimicking her one day before a brilliant circle. How well I remember it, and how every body laughed! Next to maman, you were the person she most detested; and, therefore, you will at once perceive that, depending on her wholly, as we do, it is impossible for us to comply with your wishes. You can form no idea of the triste life we lead in her antiquated mansion, Rue de Grenelle, in the Faubourg St. Germains. Would you believe it? she prohibits my receiving le Duc de Chatillion, or la Comtesse de Hauteforte, to whom, as you know, my husband has been so long attached. She will not allow us to have écarté of an evening, but insists on either of us playing piquet with her for half francs. No box at the operano visits to the theatres; in short, no any thing that is agreeable or rational. Then, she has the very worst cook in France;

consequently, we have no choice between being starved or poisoned, so execrable is her cuisine. I am confident you would pity us, were you to witness the privations we endure.

I am sure notre tante only patronises us to vex maman, who has thrown us off; but, as she is rich and old, we must please her, and my husband will be her heir: I only hope she will not long keep him an expectant one. Comme c'est drole, that Miladi Annandale should die because she was suspected! How strange and exaggerated your compatriots are in their notions! Je ne comprend rien de tout cela. I only comprehend that, if every lady in Paris who is suspected chose, therefore, to die, we should have very few left in society.

Do you know, ma chère amie, that you become tout à fait originale dans vos idées, and that you really require to leave your land of fogs, and mix with reasonable people here,

to dispel the ennui, or devils blue, as the English say, that have taken possession of your brain. You think yourself very wicked, guilty of des grands crimes, and you write as the heroines of tragedy speak: but I think you only an unlucky, and not a wicked person; and so thinks mon mari, to whom I have shewed your letters. It is the motive, and not the results, that constitutes the crime.

Your first error turned out unfortunately

that was simply an indiscretion; and, had not ce mauvais sujet that caught your youthful fancy been ruined, and left sans sous, he would not have again appeared to cast a shadow on the horizon of your prospects

this I call unlucky. When you opened the window, and he entered, you had no evil motive towards your aunt, malgré she was un peu revêche, and not un peu ennuyeuse. His poverty tempted him to take her money

and jewels; and his safety, probably, urged him to the rest. All this was very unlucky; but his poverty was, as I think I have satisfactorily proved, the cause of all cette affaire tragique; and you have, consequently, nothing of which to accuse yourself that I can see, except not having chosen a lover neither likely to ruin himself, nor to be ruined—nor capable, even in a case of necessity, of strangling old ladies.

With regard to Miladi Annaudale, you have been, also, unlucky. It is true, the triste position in which you found yourself chez madame votre tante, compelled you to urge your young friend to a marriage for which she had lost all taste: but, had she been a reasonable woman, she might have, notwithstanding, been very happy; for, with a good fortune, a brilliant position, and a weak, indulgent husband, what more could she desire?

It is not your fault that all these agrémens sufficed not to satisfy her-the fault rests with herself. She falls in love with that imbecile milord, whose stupid name I forget; you wish to enable her to marry him, and take yourself the man she dislikes: what could be more rational or agreeable? She mars this judicious and feasible scheme solely by her unaccountable scruples and false notions; then, perversely, will not be consoled; and conse

quently dies while you, absurdly, blame

:

yourself; as if you, or any other reasonable person, could have possibly foreseen such a termination to the comedy you had prepared, but which her entêtement alone has converted into a tragedy.

You are unhappy, too, because she has left you an independence. Of all the incomprehensible occurrences which you have related to me, your contrition on this account