swer,
when I learned the melancholy cause of his silence relative to the first.
He had been unable to support until the end the fatigues of the campaign.
Madam d'Epinay informed me he had had an attack of the palsy, and Madam
d'Houdetot, ill from affliction, wrote me two or three days after from
Paris, that he was going to Aix-la-Chapelle to take the benefit of the
waters. I will not say this melancholy circumstance afflicted me as it
did her; but I am of opinion my grief of heart was as painful as her
tears. The pain of knowing him to be in such a state, increased by the
fear least inquietude should have contributed to occasion it, affected me
more than anything that had yet happened, and I felt most cruelly a want
of fortitude, which in my estimation was necessary to enable me to
support so many misfortunes. Happily this generous friend did not long
leave me so overwhelmed with affliction; he did not forget me,
notwithstanding his attack; and I soon learned from himself that I had
ill judged his sentiments, and been too much alarmed for his situation.
It is now time I should come to the grand revolution of my destiny, to
the catastrophe which has divided my life in two parts so different from
each other, and, from a very trifling cause, produced such terrible
effects.

One day, little thinking of what was to happen, Madam d'Epinay sent for
me to the Chevrette. The moment I saw her I perceived in her eyes and
whole countenance an appearance of uneasiness, which struck me the more,
as this was not customary, nobody knowing better than she did how to
govern her features and her movements. "My friend," said she to me,
"I am immediately going to set off for Geneva; my breast is in a bad
state, and my health so deranged that I must go and consult Tronchin."
I was the more astonished at this resolution so suddenly taken, and at
the beginning of the bad season of the year, as thirty-six hours before
she had not, when I left her, so much as thought of it. I asked her who
she would take with her. She said her son and M. de Linant; and
afterwards carelessly added, "And you, dear, will not you go also?" As I
did not think she spoke seriously, knowing that at the season of the year
I was scarcely in a situation to go to my chamber, I joked upon the
utility of the company, of one sick person to another. She herself had
not seemed to make the proposition seriously, and here the matter
dropped. The rest of our conversation