I nevertheless thought I perceived that absence, or my misfortune, had cooled his affection for me.  It is difficult to a courtier to preserve the same attachment to a person whom he knows to be in disgrace with courts.  I moreover suspected the great ascendancy Madam de Luxembourg had over his mind, had been unfavorable to me, and that she had taken advantage of our separation to injure me in his esteem.  For her part, notwithstanding a few affected marks of regard, which daily became less frequent, she less concealed the change in her friendship.  She wrote to me four or five times into Switzerland, after which she never wrote to me again, and nothing but my prejudice, confidence and blindness, could have prevented my discovering in her something more than a coolness towards me.

Guy the bookseller, partner with Duchesne, who, after I had left Montmorency, frequently went to the hotel de Luxembourg, wrote to me that my name was in the will of the marechal.  There was nothing in this either incredible or extraordinary, on which account I had no doubt of the truth of the information.  I deliberated within myself whether or not I should receive the legacy.  Everything well considered, I determined to accept it, whatever it might be, and to do that honor to the memory of an honest man, who, in a rank in which friendship is seldom found, had had a real one for me.  I had not this duty to fulfill.  I heard no more of the legacy, whether it were true or false; and in truth I should have felt some pain in offending against one of the great maxims of my system of morality, in profiting by anything at the death of a person whom I had once held dear.  During the last illness of our friend Mussard, Leneips proposed to me to take advantage of the grateful sense he expressed for our cares, to insinuate to him dispositions in our favor.  “Ah! my dear Leneips,” said I, “let us not pollute by interested ideas the sad but sacred duties we discharge towards our dying friend.  I hope my name will never be found in the testament of any person, at least not in that of a friend.”  It was about this time that my lord marshal spoke to me of his, of what he intended to do in it for me, and that I made him the answer of which I have spoken in the first part of my memoirs.

My second loss, still more afflicting and irreparable, was that of the best of women and mothers, who, already weighed down with years, and overburthened with infirmities and misery, quitted this vale of tears for the abode of the blessed, where the amiable remembrance of the good we have done here below is the eternal reward of our benevolence.  Go, gentle and beneficent shade, to those of Fenelon, Berneg, Catinat, and others, who in a more humble state have, like them, opened their hearts to pure charity; go and taste of the fruit of your own benevolence, and prepare for your son the place he hopes to fill by your side.  Happy in your misfortunes that Heaven, in putting