Benjamin Franklin: Self-Revealed, Volume 1 — Chapter 7, Franklin's French Friends, Part 3

When the hardy resolution is once formed of reviewing the correspondence between Franklin and Madame Brillon, the most difficult task is that of compression.

What!

[she wrote to "Monsieur Papa" from Nice, after the capitulation of Cornwallis] You capture entire armies in America, you burgoinise Cornwallis, you take cannon, vessels, munitions of war, men, horses, etc. , etc. you capture everything and from everybody, and the gazette alone brings it to the knowledge of your friends, who befuddle themselves with drinking to your health, to that of Washington, of Independence, of the King of France, of the Marquis de la Fayette, of the Mrs: de Rochambault, Chalelux etc. , etc. while you do not exhibit a sign of life to them; yet you should be a bon vivant at this time, although you rarely err in that respect, and you are surely twenty years younger because of this good news, which ought to bring us a lasting peace after a glorious war.

To this letter, Franklin replied on Christmas Day of the year 1781, the birthday of the Dauphin of Heaven, he called it in the letter.

He was very sensible, he said, to the greatness of their victory, but war was full of vicissitudes and uncertainty, and he played its game with the same evenness of temper that she had seen him bring to the good and bad turns of a game of chess.

That was why he had said so little of the surrender, and had only remarked that nothing could make him perfectly happy under certain circumstances.

The point, of course, was that still another capitulation was essential to his happiness.

He then proceeds to tell Madame Brillon that, everywhere from Paris to Versailles, everyone spoke of her with respect, and some with affection and even admiration; which was music to his ears.

I often pass before your house [he adds].

It wears a desolate look to me.

Heretofore, I have broken the commandment in coveting it along with my neighbour's wife.

Now I do not covet it.

Thus I am the less a sinner.

But with regard to the wife, I always find these commandments very inconvenient, and I am sorry that we are cautioned to practise them.

Should you find yourself in your travels at the home of St. Peter, ask him to recall them, as intended only for the Jews, and as too irksome for good Christians.

These specimens are true to the language of the entire correspondence, but further excerpts from it will not be amiss for the purpose of enabling us to realize how agreeable the flirtation between the two must have been to have produced such a lengthy correspondence despite the fact that Franklin visited Madame Brillon at least every Wednesday and Saturday.

On Nov.

2, 1778, she wrote to Franklin as follows: The hope that I had of seeing you here, my dear Papa, has kept me from writing to you for Saturday's tea.

Hope is the remedy for all our ills.

If one suffers, one hopes for the end of the trouble; if one is with friends, one hopes to remain with them always; if one is away from them, one hopes to rejoin them,--and this is the only hope that is left to me.

I shall count the days, the hours, the moments; each moment gone brings me nearer to you.

We like to grow older when it is the only means of reuniting us to those whom we love.

The person, who takes life thus, seeks unceasingly to shorten it; he plans, desires; without the future, it seems to him that he has nothing.

When my children are grown up--in ten years--the trees in my garden will shade me.

The years slip by, then one regrets them.

I

might have done such and such a thing, one says then.

Had I not been only twenty-five years old, I should not have done the foolish thing of which I now repent.

The wise man alone enjoys the present, does not regret the past, and awaits peacefully the future.

The wise man, who, like you, my Papa, has passed his youth in acquiring knowledge and enlightening his fellow-men, and his mature years in obtaining liberty for them, brings a complaisant eye to bear on the past, enjoys the present, and awaits the reward of his labors in the future; but how many are wise?

I try to become so, and am so in some respects: I take no account of wealth, vanity has little hold upon my heart; I like to do my duty; I freely forgive society its errors and injustices.

But I love my friends with an idolatry that often does me much harm: a prodigious imagination, a soul of fire will always get the better of all my plans and thoughts.

I see, Papa, that I must never lay claim to any but the one perfection of loving the most that is possible.

May this quality make you love your daughter always!...

Come, you always know how to combine a great measure of wisdom with a touch of roguishness; you ask Brillon for news of me at the very moment when you are receiving a letter from me; you play the part of the neglected one, just when you are being spoiled, and then you deny it like a madman when the secret is discovered.

Oh, I have news of you!

...

Mama, my children, and Mlle.

Jupin present their respects to you.

May I venture to beg you to give my kind regards to Mr. Franklinet?

Another letter in the same vein from Madame Brillon to Franklin bears date May 11, 1779: You are quite right, my good Papa, we should find true happiness only in peace of mind; it is not in our power to change the nature of those with whom we live, nor to check the course of the contradictions that surround us.

It is a wise man who speaks, and who tries to comfort his too sensitive daughter by telling her the truth.

Oh, my father, I beseech your friendship, your healthy philosophy; my heart hears you and is submissive to you.

Give me strength to take the place of an indifference that your child can never feel.

But admit, my friend, that for one who knows how to love, ingratitude is a frightful misfortune; that it is hard for a woman who would give her life without hesitation to insure her husband's happiness to see the results of her exertions and her longings wiped out by intrigue, and falsity.

Time will make everything right; my Papa has said so, and I believe it.

But my Papa has also said that time is the stuff that life is made of.

_My_ life, my friend, is made of a fine and thin stuff, that grief rends cruelly; if I had anything to reproach myself with, I should long have ceased to exist.

My soul is pure, simple, frank.

I dare to tell my Papa so;

I dare to tell him that it is worthy of him; I dare still to assure him that my conduct, which he has deemed wise, will not belie itself, that I shall await justice with patience, that I shall follow the advice of my worthy friend with steadiness and confidence.

Adieu, you whom I love so much--my kind Papa.

Never call me anything but "my daughter."

Yesterday you called me "Madame," and my heart shrank, I examined myself, to see whether I had done you any wrong, or if I had some failings that you would not tell me of.

Pardon, my friend; I am not visiting you with a reproach, I am accusing myself of a weakness.

I was born much too sensitive for my happiness and for that of my friends; cure me, or pity me; if you can, do one or the other.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, you will come to tea, will you not?

Believe me, my Papa, that the pleasure I feel in receiving you is shared by my husband, my children, and my friends; I cannot doubt it, and I assure you of it.

Franklin's reply to this letter is for a brief moment that of a real father rather than Monsieur Papa.

This reminds us that, in one of her letters to him, she states that in her own father she had lost her first and best friend, and recalled the fact that Franklin had told her of the custom of certain savages, who adopt the prisoners, that they capture in war, and make them take the place of the relations whom they have lost.

In answer to her statement that ingratitude is a frightful misfortune, he says: "That is true--to ingrates--but not to their benefactors.

You have conferred benefits on those that you have believed worthy of them; you have, therefore, done your duty, as it is a part of our duty to be kindly, and you ought to be satisfied with that and happy in the reflection."

This was followed by the advice to his "very dear and always lovable daughter" to continue to fulfill all her duties as a good mother, a good wife, a good friend, a good neighbor, a good Christian, etc. We shall see a little later on what he deemed a part of the duty of a good charitable Christian to be.

The letter terminates with an apology for his bad French.

"It may," he said, "disgust you, you who write that charming language with so much purity and elegance.

But, if you can in the end decipher my awkward and improper expressions, you will, at least, perhaps, experience the kind of pleasure that we find in solving enigmas or discovering secrets."

His letter transmitting his _Dialogue with the Gout_ to Madame Brillon was not so decorous.

It was in it that he had a word to say about the other kind of Christian conduct that he was in the habit of enjoining upon her.

A

part of this letter was the following: One of the characters in your story, namely, the Gout appeared to me to reason well enough, with the exception of his supposition that mistresses have had something to do with producing this painful malady.

I

myself believe the entire contrary, and this is my method of reasoning.

When I was a young man, and enjoyed the favors of the sex more freely than at present, I had no gout.

Therefore, if the ladies of Passy had had more of that kind of Christian charity, that I have often recommended to you in vain, I would not have the gout at present.

This seems to me to be good logic.

I am much better.

I suffer little pain, but I am very feeble.

I can, as you see, joke a little, but I cannot be really gay before I hear that your precious health is re-established.

I send you my Dialogue in the hope that it may amuse you at times.

Many thanks for the three last volumes of Montaigne that I return.

The visit of your ever lovable family yesterday evening has done me much good.

My God!

how I love them all from the Grandmother and the father to the smallest child.

The reply of Madame Brillon was in kindred terms: Saturday, 18th November, 1780. There would be many little things indeed to criticise in your logic, which you fortify so well, my dear Papa.

"When I was a young man," you say, "and enjoyed the favors of the sex more freely than at present, I had no gout."

"Therefore," one might reply to this, "when I threw myself out of the window, I did not break my leg."

Therefore, you could have the gout without having deserved it, and you could have well deserved it, as I believe, and not have had it.

If this last argument is not so brilliant as the others, it is clear and sure; what is neither clear nor sure are the arguments of philosophers who insist that everything that happens in the world is necessary to the general movement of the universal machine.

I

believe that the machine would go neither better nor worse if you did not have the gout, and if I were forever rid of my nervous troubles.

I do not see what help, more or less, these little incidents can give to the wheels that turn this world at random, and I know that my little machine goes very much the worse for them.

What I know very well besides, is that pain sometimes becomes mistress of reason, and that patience alone can overcome these two nuisances.

I

have as much of it as I can, and I advise you, my friend, to have the same amount.

When frosts have cast a gloom over the earth, a bright sun makes us forget them.

We are in the midst of frosts, and must wait patiently for this bright sun, and, while waiting for it, amuse ourselves in the moments when weakness and pain leave us some rest.

_This_, my dear Papa, is _my_ logic....

Adieu, my good Papa.

My big husband will take my letter to you; he is very happy to be able to go to see you.

For me, nothing remains but the faculty of loving my friends.

You surely do not doubt that I shall do my best for you, even to Christian charity, that is to say, with the exception of your Christian charity.

She writes a brief letter to Franklin on New Year's Day of 1781: If I had a good head and good legs--if, in short, I had everything that I lack,--I should have come, like a good daughter, to wish a happy New Year to the best of papas.

But I have only a very tender heart to love him well, and a rather bad pen to scribble him that this year, as well as last year, and all the years of my life, I shall love him, myself alone, as much as all the others that love him, put together.

Brillon and the children present their respects to the kind Papa; and we also send a thousand messages for M. Franklinet.

Some four years later, after Franklin had vainly endeavored to marry Temple Franklin to a daughter of Madame Brillon, we find him writing a letter of congratulation to her upon the happy _accouchement_ of her daughter.

It elicits a reply in which the cheek of the "beautiful and benignant nature," of which she speaks, undergoes a considerable amount of artificial coloring.

2nd December, 1784. Your letter, my kind Papa, has given me keen pleasure;

but, if you would give me still more, remain in France until you see my sixth generation.

I only ask you for fifteen or sixteen years: my granddaughter will be marriageable early; she is fair and strong.

I am tasting a new feeling, my good Papa, to which my heart surrenders itself with pleasure, it is so sweet to love.

I have never been able to conceive how beings exist who are such enemies to themselves as to reject friendship.

They are ingrates, we say; well we are deceived; that is a little hard sometimes, but we are not always so; and to feel oneself incapable of returning the treachery affords a satisfaction of itself that consoles us for it.

My little nurse is charming and fresh as a morning rose.

The first days the child had difficulty,...

but patience and the mother's courage overcame it; all goes well now, and nothing could be more interesting than this picture of a young and pretty person nursing a superb child, the father uninterruptedly occupied with the spectacle, and joining his attentions to those of his wife.

My eyes are unceasingly moist, and my heart rejoices, my kind Papa.

You realize so well the value of all that belongs to beautiful and benignant nature that I owe you these details.

My daughter charges me with her thanks and compliments to you; _ma Cadette_ and my men present their regards, and as for me, my friend, I beg you to believe that my friendship and my existence will always be one as respects you.

Once Franklin sought to corner Madame Brillon with a story, which makes us feel for a moment as if the rod of transformation was beginning to work a backward spell, and the Benjamin Franklin of Craven Street and Independence Hall to be released from the spell of the French Circe: To make you better realize the force of my demonstration that you do not love me, I commence with a little story: A beggar asked a rich Bishop for a louis by way of alms.

You are wild.

No one gives a louis to a beggar.

An écu then.

No. That is too much.

A liard then,--or your benediction.

My benediction!

Yes, I will give it to you.

No, I will not accept it.

For if it was worth a liard, you would not be willing to give it to me.

That was how this Bishop loved his neighbor.

That was his charity!

And, were I to scrutinize yours, I would not find it much greater.

I am incredibly hungry for it and you have given me nothing to eat.

I was a stranger, and I was almost as love-sick as Colin when you were singing, and you have neither taken me in, nor cured me, nor eased me.

You who are as rich as an Archbishop in all the Christian and moral virtues, and could sacrifice a small share of some of them without visible loss, you tell me that it is asking too much, and that you are not willing to do it.

That is your charity to a poor wretch, who once enjoyed affluence, and is unfortunately reduced to soliciting alms.

Nevertheless, you say you love him.

But you would not give him your friendship if it involved the expenditure of the least little morsel, of the value of a liard, of your wisdom.

But see how nimbly the coquette eludes her pursuer: MY DEAR PAPA: Your bishop was a niggard and your beggar a queer enough fellow.

You are a logician all the cleverer because you argue in a charming way, and almost awaken an inclination to yield to your unsound arguments founded on a false principle.

Is it of Dr. Franklin, the celebrated philosopher, the profound statesman, that a woman speaks with so much irreverence?

Yes, this erudite man, this legislator, has his infirmities (it is the weakness, moreover, of great men: he has taken full advantage of it).

But let us go into the matter.

To prove that I do not love you, my good Papa, you compare yourself to a beggar who asked alms from a bishop.

Now, the rôle of a bishop is not to refuse to give to beggars when they are really in want; he honors himself in doing good.

But in truth the kind of charity which you ask of me so amusingly can be found everywhere.

You will not grow thin because of my refusals!

What would you think of your beggar, if, the bishop having given him the "louis" which he asked, he had grumbled because he did not get two?

That, however, is your case, my good friend.

You adopted me as your daughter, I chose you for my father: what do you expect of me?

Friendship!

Well, I love you as a daughter should love her father.

The purest, the most respectful, the tenderest affection for you fills my soul; you asked me for a "louis"; I gave it to you, and yet you murmur at not getting another one, which does not belong to me.

It is a treasure which has been entrusted to me, my good Papa;

I guard it and will always guard it carefully.

Even if you were like "Colin sick," in truth I could not cure you; and nevertheless, whatever you may think or say, no one in this world loves you more than I. In this letter she puts him off with the teasing assurance of friendship.

In another, written from Marseilles, it is with other charming women that she mocks him: I received on my arrival here, my good Papa, your letter of October 1st.

It has given me keen pleasure; I found in it evidences of your friendship and a tinge of that gayety and gallantry which make all women love you, because you love them all.

Your proposition to carry me on your wings, if you were the angel Gabriel, made me laugh; but I would not accept it, although I am no longer very young nor a virgin.

That angel was a sly fellow and your nature united to his would become too dangerous.

I should be afraid of miracles happening, and miracles between women and angels might well not always bring a redeemer....

I have arranged, my good friend, to write alternately to my "great neighbor" and to you; the one to whom I shall not have written will kindly tell the other that I love him with all my heart, and when your turn comes you will add an embrace for the good wife of our neighbor, for her daughter, for little Mother Caillot, for all the gentle and pretty women of my acquaintance whom you may meet.

You see that not being able to amuse you, either by my singing or by chess, I seek to procure you other pleasures.

If you had been at Avignon with us, it is there you would have wished to embrace people.

The women there are charming; I thought of you every time I saw one of them.

Adieu, my good Papa; I do not relate to you the details of my journey, as I have written of them to our neighbor, who will communicate them to you.

I limit myself to assuring you of the most constant and the tenderest friendship on my part.

At times the pursuer is too badly afflicted with gout in his legs to maintain the pursuit, and the pursued has to come to his assistance to keep the flirtation going: How are you, my good Papa?

Never has it cost me so much to leave you; every evening it seems to me that you would be very glad to see me, and every evening I think of you.

On Monday, the 21st, I shall go to meet you again; I hope that you will then be very firm on your feet, and that the teas of Wednesday and Saturday, and that of Sunday morning, will regain all their brilliance.

I will bring you _la bonne évéque_.

My fat husband will make you laugh, our children will laugh together, our great neighbor will quiz, the Abbés La Roche and Morellet will eat all the butter, Mme.

Grand, her amiable niece, and M. Grand will help the company out, Père Pagin will play _God of Love_ on his violin, I the march on the Piano, and you _Petits Oiseaux_ on the armonica.

O!

my friend, let us see in the future fine and strong legs for you, and think no more of the bad one that has persecuted you so much.

After what is bad, one enjoys what is good more; life is sown with both, which she changes unceasingly.

What she cannot keep from being equal and uniform is my tenderness for you, that time, place, and events will never alter.

My mother and all my family wish to be remembered to you.

I have had some news of you through our neighbor, but I must absolutely have some from you.

Amusingly enough, M. Brillon contributes his part to the restoration of the gouty legs to something like normal activity.

The visits of your good husband during my sickness [wrote Franklin to Madame Brillon] have been very agreeable to me.

His conversation has eased and enlivened me.

I regret that, instead of seeking it when I have been at your home, I have lost so much time in playing chess.

He has many stories and always applies them well.

If he has despoiled you of some, you can repeat them all the same, for they will always please me, coming from your mouth.

There is another letter from Madame Brillon to Franklin which drew a reply from him, in which he ascended into the Christian heaven with almost as much literary facility as marked his entrance into the Pagan Elysium.

Her letter was written during an absence from home: Here I am reduced to writing to you, my good Papa, and to telling you that I love you.

It was sweeter no doubt to let you see it in my eyes.

How am I going to spend the Wednesdays and Saturdays?

No teas, no chess, no music, no hope of seeing or embracing my good papa!

It seems to me that the privation which I experience from your absence would suffice to make me change my views, were I inclined to materialism.

Happiness is so uncertain, so full of crosses, that the deep conviction that we shall be happier in another life can alone tide us over the trials of this one.

In Paradise we shall be reunited, never to leave each other again!

We shall there live on roasted apples only; the music will be made up of Scotch airs; all parties will be given over to chess, so that no one may be disappointed; every one will speak the same language; the English will be neither unjust nor wicked there; the women will not be coquettes, the men will be neither jealous nor too gallant; "King John" will be left to eat his apples in peace; perhaps he will be decent enough to offer some to his neighbors--who knows?

since we shall want for nothing in paradise!

We shall never suffer from gout or nervous troubles there.

Mr. Mesmer will content himself with playing on the armonica, without wearying us with the electric fluid;

ambition, envy, snobbery, jealousy, prejudice, all these will vanish at the sound of the trumpet.

A

lasting, sweet and peaceful friendship will animate every gathering.

Every day we shall love one another, in order that we may love one another still more the day after; in a word, we shall be completely happy.

In the meantime, let us get all the good we can out of this poor world of ours.

I am far from you, my good Papa; I look forward to the time of our meeting, and I am pleased to think that your regrets and desires equal mine.

My mother and my children send you a thousand tender messages of respect; we should all like to have you here.

May I venture to ask you to remember us to your grandson?

And this was the deft reply of Franklin which has come down to us in French corrected by Madame Brillon's hand: Since you have assured me that we shall meet each other again, and shall recognize each other, in Paradise, I have reflected continually on our arrangements in that country; for I have great confidence in your assurances, and I believe implicitly what you believe.

Probably more than forty years will pass away, after my arrival there, before you will follow me.

I fear a little that, in the course of such a long time, you may forget me; that is why I have had thoughts of proposing to you that you give me your word that you will not renew your contract with M. Brillon.

I would give you mine at the same time to wait for you, but this monsieur is so good, so generous to us--he loves you--and we him--so well--that I can not think of this proposition without some scruples of conscience--however the idea of an eternity, in which I should not be more favored than to be allowed to kiss your hands, or your cheeks occasionally, and to pass two or three hours in your sweet society at Wednesday and Saturday evening parties, is frightful.

In fine, I can not make that proposal, but since, like all who know you, I desire to see you happy in every respect, we may agree to say nothing more about it at this time, and to leave you at liberty to decide, when we are all together again: there to determine the question as you deem best for your happiness and ours; but, determine it as you will, I feel that I shall love you eternally.

Should you reject me, perhaps, I shall pay my addresses to Madame D'Hardancourt (the mother of Madame Brillon), who might be glad to keep house for me.

In that event I should pass my domestic hours agreeably with her; and I should be better prepared to see you.

I should have enough time in those forty years there to practise on the armonica, and, perhaps, I should play well enough to be worthy to accompany your pianoforte.

We should have little concerts from time to time, good father Pagin would be of the company, your neighbor and his dear family [M. Jupin], M. de Chaumont, M. B.

, M.

Jourdan, M. Grammont, Madame du Tartre, the little mother, and some other select friends will be our audience, and the dear, good girls, accompanied by some other young angels, whose portraits you have already given me, will sing hallelujahs with us; we shall eat together apples of Paradise, roasted with butter and nutmeg; and we shall pity them who are not dead.

In another letter, he complains that she shuts him out from everything except a few civil and polite kisses such as she might give to some of her small cousins.

All this, however, was but preliminary to the treaty, which the signer of the Treaty of Alliance between France and the United States formally submitted to her in this letter.

Among the articles of this treaty were to be these: Article 6. And the said Mr. F.

on his part stipulates and covenants that he is to call at the home of M'de B. as often as he pleases.

Article 7. That he is to remain there as long as he pleases.

Article 8. And that when he is with her, he is to do what he pleases.

He did not have much hope, he said, of obtaining her consent to the eighth article.

In another letter, the aged lover tells Madame Brillon that she must not accuse others of being responsible for his having left her half an hour sooner than usual.

The truth was that he was very much fatigued for special reasons that he mentions, and thought it more decent to leave her than to fall asleep, which he was beginning to do on a bench in her garden after her descent into it.

After all a half-hour with an old man, who could not make the best use of it, was a thing of very little importance.

Saturday evening, he would remain with her until she wished him to go, and, in spite of her usual polite phrases, he would know the time by her refusal to give him a little kiss.

With another note, he sent to Madame Brillon his Essay on the Morals of Chess.

It was only proper that it should be dedicated to her, he said, as its good advice was copied from her generous and magnanimous way of playing the game.

In the same letter, he stated that his grandson had inspected the house that she had urged him to apply for, but, true still to his adopted character, he said, "He finds it too magnificent for simple Republicans."

In another letter, he told Madame Brillon that he loved to live, because it seemed to him that there was much more pleasure than pain in existence.

We should not blame Providence rashly.

She should reflect how many even of our duties it had made pleasures, and that it had been good enough, moreover, to call several pleasures sins to enhance our enjoyment of them.

One more letter from Madame Brillon and we shall let her retire from the chess-board with the credit of having proved herself fully a match for Franklin in the longest and most absorbing game of chess that he played in France: 25th of December at Nice.

The atonement is adequate, my dear Papa.

I shall no longer call you _Monseigneur_ nor even _Monsieur_.

My petition succeeded before reaching you; our tears are dried.

You love us, you tell us so; you are in good health, and are as roguish as ever, since you are planning to steal me from Brillon, and to take me on a trip to America without letting anyone know it.

Everything is as usual.

I recognize your fine mask, and I am wholly satisfied.

But, my good Papa, why say that you write French badly,--that your pleasantries in that language are only nonsense?

To make an academic discourse, one must be a good grammarian; but to write to our friends all we need is a heart, and you combine with the best heart, my lovable Papa, when you wish, the soundest ethics, a lively imagination, and that roguishness, so pleasant, which shows that the wisest man in the world allows his wisdom to be perpetually broken against the rocks of femininity.

Write to me, therefore, write to me often and much, or from spite I shall learn English.

I should want to know it quickly, and that would hurt me as I have been forbidden all study, and you would be the cause of my ills, for having refused me a few lines of your bad French, which my family and I--and we are not simpletons--consider very good; ask my neighbors, M. d'Estaing, Mme.

Helvétius and her abbés, if it would be right for you to prejudice the improvement which the sun here has caused in my health, for the sake of a little _amour propre_ which is beneath My Lord the Ambassador, Benjamin Franklin.

One more letter from Franklin, and we shall cease to walk upon eggs.

The French drapery is gone and nothing is left but Saxon nudity: I am charm'd with the goodness of my spiritual guide, and resign myself implicitly to her Conduct, as she promises to lead me to heaven in so delicious a Road when I could be content to travel thither even in the roughest of all ways with the pleasure of her company.

How kindly partial to her Penitent in finding him, on examining his conscience, guilty of only one capital sin and to call that by the gentle name of Foible!

I lay fast hold of your promise to absolve me of all Sins past, present, & future, on the easy & pleasing Condition of loving God, America and my guide above all things.

I am in rapture when I think of being absolv'd of the future.

People commonly speak of Ten Commandments.

--I have been taught that there are twelve.

The first was increase & multiply & replenish the earth.

The twelfth is, A new Commandment I give unto you, _that you love one another_.

It seems to me that they are a little misplaced, And that the last should have been the first.

However I never made any difficulty about that, but was always willing to obey them both whenever I had an opportunity.

Pray tell me dear Casuist, whether my keeping religiously these two commandments tho' not in the Decalogue, may not be accepted in Compensation for my breaking so often one of the ten, I mean that which forbids coveting my neighbour's wife, and which I confess I break constantly God forgive me, as often as I see or think of my lovely Confessor, and I am afraid I should never be able to repent of the Sin even if I had the full Possession of her.

And now I am Consulting you upon a Case of Conscience I will mention the Opinion of a certain Father of the church which I find myself willing to adopt though I am not sure it is orthodox.

It is this, that the most effectual way to get rid of a certain Temptation is, as often as it returns, to comply with and satisfy it.

Pray instruct me how far I may venture to practice upon this Principle?

But why should I be so scrupulous when you have promised to absolve me of the future?

Adieu my charming Conductress and believe me ever with the sincerest Esteem & affection.

Your most obed't hum.

Serv.