To Monsieur le Vicomte Felix de Vandenesse: 

What happiness for me, dear friend, to gather the scattered elements of my experience that I may arm you against the dangers of the world, through which I pray that you pass scatheless.  I have felt the highest pleasures of maternal love as night after night I have thought of these things.  While writing this letter, sentence by sentence, projecting my thoughts into the life you are about to lead, I went often to my window.  Looking at the towers of Frapesle, visible in the moonlight, I said to myself, “He sleeps, I wake for him.”  Delightful feelings! which recall the happiest of my life, when I watched Jacques sleeping in his cradle and waited till he wakened, to feed him with my milk.  You are the man-child whose soul must now be strengthened by precepts never taught in schools, but which we women have the privilege of inculcating.  These precepts will influence your success; they prepare the way for it, they will secure it.  Am I not exercising a spiritual motherhood in giving you a standard by which to judge the actions of your life; a motherhood comprehended, is it not, by the child?  Dear Felix, let me, even though I may make a few mistakes, let me give to our friendship a proof of the disinterestedness which sanctifies it.

In yielding you to the world I am renouncing you; but I love you too well not to sacrifice my happiness to your welfare.  For the last four months you have made me reflect deeply on the laws and customs which regulate our epoch.  The conversations I have had with my aunt, well-known to you who have replaced her, the events of Monsieur de Mortsauf’s life, which he has told me, the tales related by my father, to whom society and the court are familiar in their greatest as well as in their smallest aspects, all these have risen in my memory for the benefit of my adopted child at the moment when he is about to be launched, well-nigh alone, among men; about to act without adviser in a world where many are wrecked by their own best qualities thoughtlessly displayed, while others succeed through a judicious use of their worst.

  I ask you to ponder this statement of my opinion of society as a
  whole; it is concise, for to you a few words are sufficient.

I do not know whether societies are of divine origin or whether they were invented by man.  I am equally ignorant of the direction in which they tend.  What I do know certainly is the fact of their existence.  No sooner therefore do you enter society, instead of living a life apart, than you are bound to consider its conditions binding; a contract is signed between you.  Does society in these days gain more from a man than it returns to him?  I think so; but as to whether the individual man finds more cost than profit, or buys too dear the advantages he obtains, concerns the legislator only; I have nothing to say to that.  In my judgment you are bound to obey in all things the general