to them a period, has spared you the cruel spectacle of his!  Fearing, lest I should fill her heart with sorrow by the recital of my first disasters, I had not written to her since my arrival in Switzerland; but I wrote to M. de Conzie, to inquire after her situation, and it was from him I learned she had ceased to alleviate the sufferings of the afflicted, and that her own were at an end.  I myself shall not suffer long; but if I thought I should not see her again in the life to come, my feeble imagination would less delight in the idea of the perfect happiness I there hope to enjoy.

My third and last loss, for since that time I have not had a friend to lose, was that of the lord marshal.  He did not die but tired of serving the ungratful, he left Neuchatel, and I have never seen him since.  He still lives, and will, I hope, survive me:  he is alive, and thanks to him all my attachments on earth are not destroyed.  There is one man still worthy of my friendship; for the real value of this consists more in what we feel than in that which we inspire; but I have lost the pleasure I enjoyed in his, and can rank him in the number of those only whom I love, but with whom I am no longer connected.  He went to England to receive the pardon of the king, and acquired the possession of the property which formerly had been confiscated.  We did not separate without an intention of again being united, the idea of which seemed to give him as much pleasure as I received from it.  He determined to reside at Keith Hall, near Aberdeen, and I was to join him as soon as he was settled there:  but this project was too flattering to my hopes to give me any of its success.  He did not remain in Scotland.  The affectionate solicitations of the King of Prussia induced him to return to Berlin, and the reason of my not going to him there will presently appear.

Before this departure, foreseeing the storm which my enemies began to raise against me, he of his own accord sent me letters of naturalization, which seemed to be a certain means of preventing me from being driven from the country.  The community of the Convent of Val de Travers followed the example of the governor, and gave me letters of Communion, gratis, as they were the first.  Thus, in every respect, become a citizen, I was sheltered from legal expulsion, even by the prince; but it has never been by legitimate means, that the man who, of all others, has shown the greatest respect for the laws, has been persecuted.  I do not think I ought to enumerate, amongst the number of my losses at this time, that of the Abbe Malby.  Having lived sometime at the house of his mother, I have been acquainted with the abbe, but not very intimately, and I have reason to believe the nature of his sentiments with respect to me changed after I acquired a greater celebrity than he already had.  But the first time I discovered his insincerity was immediately after the publication of the ‘Letters from the Mountain’.  A letter attributed to him, addressed to Madam Saladin, was handed about in Geneva, in which he spoke of this work as the seditious clamors of a furious demagogue.