MADEMOISELLE,—M. de Lançon, who has been so good as to bring me your charming letter himself, will be rewarded for it by the pleasure of delivering my reply to you. He has just told me that he is going to leave for London to-morrow, and I hasten to take advantage of his journey to tell you how flattered I feel, and how grateful I am to you, for the ten pages to which you have treated me. I should complain less bitterly of your absence if it procured for me from time to time such epistles. Never has so sad a nation as the English been spoken of more gaily, neither has a gay and light-hearted nation such as ours been discussed more rationally and philosophically. You alone, Mademoiselle, possess the gift of expressing humorously profound and earnest thought. It is indeed a pity that you have not practised the art of Thalia! You would have been more successful than most of our present writers of comedy, who only excite the hilarity of the ignorant and the vicious, such as the author of the _Marriage of Figaro_, who (speaking of marriage) has just married his mistress in order to legitimatise a girl six or eight years old whom she had borne him. Now that he is rich, people assert that his wife, who, they say, is his fourth, will be happier with him than her predecessors. I am sorry, but not surprised, that the brother and heir of Lord Ferrers is not like him as far as honesty is concerned; _sorry_ because it makes you suffer; _not surprised_ because of three of my brothers, whose fortunes I have made at the expense of my own, not one would sacrifice so much as a sovereign to oblige me, such is their ingratitude and love of money.