Such is the portrait which historians have given to us of the minister in his retirement. His own letters show that, with these sources of enjoyment, he did not altogether disdain others of a less spiritual character. A letter to one of the regent's secretaries, written soon after the cardinal's arrival at Besançon, concludes in the following manner: "I know that God will recompense men according to their deserts. I have confidence that he will aid me; and that I shall yet be able to draw profit from what my enemies designed for my ruin. This is my philosophy, with which I endeavor to live as joyously as I can, laughing at the world, its calumnies and its passions."[603] With all this happy mixture of the Epicurean and the Stoic, the philosophic statesman did not so contentedly submit to his fate as to forego the hope of seeing himself soon reinstated in authority in the Netherlands. "In the course of two months," he writes, "you may expect to see me there."[604] He kept up an active correspondence with the friends whom he had left in Brussels, and furnished the results of the information thus obtained, with his own commentaries, to the court at Madrid. His counsel was courted, and greatly considered, by Philip; so that from the shades of his retirement the banished minister was still thought to exercise an important influence on the destiny of Flanders. * * * * * A singular history is attached to the papers of Granvelle. That minister resembled his master, Philip the Second, in the fertility of his epistolary vein. That the king had a passion for writing, notwithstanding he could throw the burden of the correspondence, when it suited him, on the other party, is proved by the quantity of letters he left behind him. The example of the monarch seems to have had its influence on his courtiers; and no reign of that time is illustrated by a greater amount of written materials from the hands of the principal actors in it. Far from a poverty of materials, therefore, the historian has much more reason to complain of an _embarras de richesses_. [Sidenote: THE GRANVELLE PAPERS.] Granvelle filled the highest posts in different parts of the Spanish empire; and in each of these--in the Netherlands, where he was minister, in Naples, where he was viceroy, in Spain, where he took the lead in the cabinet, and in Besançon, whither he retired from public life--he left ample memorials under his own hand of his residence there. This was particularly the case with Besançon, his native town, and the favorite residence to which he turned, as he tells us, from the turmoil of office to enjoy the sweets of privacy,--yet not, in truth, so sweet to him as the stormy career of the statesman, to judge from the tenacity with which he clung to office.