"les habitans aimables de
cette ville," she pays him a few compliments.

"I beg you to say in rhymed prose, to M. Menier, a thousand things for
me, which will become beautiful spoken by your lips, and heard by his
ears. I am as much astonished as pleased with your punctuality in
writing. Every post-day we are all on the look-out. Madame Grimod begs
her compliments--and so do all the family, whom I delight with the
reading of your letters. They are so witty and clever! If you employ
much of your time in writing them, we spend a great deal of ours in
reading them."

But the trips of the year 1769 are not over yet. Scarcely, says the
_Memoire_, had the Sieur Lebrun returned from Marseilles, when the Dame
Lebrun set off, in company with M. Grimod, to visit it. She spent six
weeks there, during which she wrote several letters to her husband, and
cherished his answers as before. But we shall not follow the example of
the _Memoire_, in repeating all these tit-for-tat endearments, but
pursue our own object, which is to trace the style of occupation of
people of their rank. And here we must observe, that, as far as we see
in this process, the whole occupation of the Grimods and others was to
make tours for their pleasure, and get up fetes for their amusement.
Wherever they are, there is always something or other going on--a
breakfast, a dance, or a masquerade; and in spite of the protestations
of the Dame Lebrun, of her sorrow at being separated from her little
man, it is evident she never allows her grief to have any effect upon
her appetite. It rather seems as if, in all her distresses, she applied
to the cook, and measured the extent of her sufferings by the quantity
she could dispatch at a meal.

"How delighted I should be with but one quarter of an hour of your
charming conversations with Madame la Comtesse de Brancas! But from
intellectual feasts like that, I am doomed here to the most rigorous
abstinence; and, to make up for it, I am forced to throw myself on the
mullets, sardines, sprats, and tunnies, with the wines of Cyprus and
Syracuse; so that I have always the body full and the mind empty. You
sent me an admirable piece of wit. I laughed at it amazingly, and wished
to read it to some of the people here; but I soon perceived that their
appreciation of letters is limited to letters of exchange. In spite of
that, they are never tired of praising you, and holding forth about your
talents."

In a letter of the 25th