If these are observed, I am as(su)red that
after a time I shall be well, and that my lease for ten or twenty
years seems as yet a good one. As for the labour and sorrow which
his Majesty K(ing) D(avid) speaks of, I know of no age that is quite
exempt from them, and have no fear of their being more severe in my
caducity than they were in the flower of my age, when I had not more
things to please me than I have now, although they might vary in
their kind. When I see you and Lord C. with your children about you,
and all of you in perfect health and spirits, my sensations of
pleasure are greater than in the most joyous hours of my youth. It
is no solitude, this place. We have got Onslows and Jeffreyes's, Mr.
Walpole, &c., &c., and if Mr. Cambridge would permit it, I could be
sometimes, as I wish to be, alone.

On Monday Mie Mie and I shall go to town for one night. I am to meet
Me de Bouflers(270) at Lady Lucan's. I think that if this next
winter does not make a perfect Frenchman of me, I shall give it up.
I hope, more, that it will afford Mie Mie also an opportunity of
improving herself in a language which will be of more use to her, in
all probability, than it can ever hereafter be to me. I am not
disgusted with the language by the abhorrence which I have at
present of the country. But these calamities, at times, happen in
all climes, as well as in France. Man is a most savage animal when
uncontrolled.

The last accounts brought from France fill me with more horror than
any former ones. The King is to be moved only by the fear of some
approaching danger to his person. The Queen is agitated by all the
alarming and distressing thoughts imaginable. Her health is visibly
altered; she cries continually, and is, as Polinitz says of K(ing)
James's Queen, une Arethuse. Her danger has been imminent; and the
K(ing) left his capital, and her in it, as he was advised to do, il
eut ete fait d'elle; she would have been, probably, dragged to the
Hotel de Ville, et auroit fini ses jours en Greve. She holds out her
children, which are called les enfans de la Reine exclusivement, as
beggars in the streets do theirs, to move compassion. Behold, how
low they have reduced a Queen! But as yet she is not ripe for
tragedy, so John St. John may employ his muse upon other subjects
for a time. To speak the truth, all these representations of the
miseries of the French nation do not seem to me (very decent) proper
subjects for our evening specta