former intendant, a M. de
Basville, has rendered his memory dear to the traveller and amateur, by
the pains he took to preserve and restore these monuments of antiquity.
The present one (I do not know who he is) is demolishing the object, to
make a good road to it. I thought of you again, and I was then in great
good humor, at the Pont du Gard, a sublime antiquity, and well
preserved. But most of all here, where Roman taste, genius, and
magnificence, excite ideas analogous to yours at every step. I could no
longer oppose the inclination to avail myself of your permission to
write to you, a permission given with too much complaisance by you, and
used by me with too much indiscretion. Madame de Tott did me the same
honor. But she, being only the descendant of some of those puny heroes
who boiled their own kettles before the walls of Troy, I shall write to
her from a Grecian, rather than a Roman canton; when I shall find
myself, for example, among her Phocaean relations at Marseilles.

Loving, as you do Madam, the precious remains of antiquity, loving
architecture, gardening, a warm sun and a clear sky, I wonder you have
never thought of moving Chaville to Nismes. This, as you know, has not
always been deemed impracticable; and, therefore, the next time a
_Sur-intendant des batiments du roi_, after the example of M. Colbert,
sends persons to Nismes to move the Maison Quarree to Paris, that they
may not come empty handed, desire them to bring Chaville with them, to
replace it. _A propos_ of Paris. I have now been three weeks from
there, without knowing anything of what has passed. I suppose I shall
meet it all at Aix, where I have directed my letters to be lodged,
_poste restante_. My journey has given me leisure to reflect on this
Assemblee des Notables. Under a good and a young King, as the present,
I think good may be made of it. I would have the deputies then, by all
means, so conduct themselves as to encourage him to repeat the calls of
this Assembly. Their first step should be, to get themselves divided
into two chambers instead of seven; the Noblesse and the Commons
separately. The second, to persuade the King, instead of choosing the
deputies of the Commons himself, to summon those chosen by the people
for the Provincial administrations. The third, as the Noblesse is too
numerous to be all of the Assemblee, to obtain permission for that body
to choose its own deputies. Two Houses, so elected, would contain a
mass of