This lady had resided some years at Rotterdam with her family. She was only daughter to the Count de Trevier, was heiress to a large fortune, and possessed exquisite beauty, good-sense, and every accomplishment that was likely to preserve and to improve the authority beauty gives to make it _indefectible_ and _interminable_. But the duke, her husband, unfortunately was soon satiated with the regularity of her virtues: His affections could not long be preserved by a woman of her amiable undisguised character. When custom had taken off the edge from his passion, he endeavoured to rouse his torpid mind by a change of object. That vivacity which the tender passions impart to pleasure, was a powerful incentive for him to indulge them. His heart found fresh delight in gallantry, to which he was naturally prone: a dangerous delight, which, habituating the mind to the most lively transports, gives it a distaste to all moderate and temperate enjoyments: from thence forward the innocent and tranquil joys which nature offers, lose all their relish. His sophisticated mind made him blind to the merit of his wife, who loved him tenderly.--She felt most severely his neglect, and contracted insensibly a settled melancholy, which served the more effectually to alienate his affections from her. She became miserable:--and no temper can be so invincibly good as to hold out against the siege of constant slights and neglects. Misfortunes she had strength of mind to support, and death she could have encountered with greater resolution than the displeasure and peevishness of the man she loved. Wherever there is love, there is a degree of fear--we are naturally afraid of offending, or of doing any thing which may lessen us in the esteem of an object that is dear to us: and if we are conscious of any act by which we may have incurred displeasure, we are impatient and miserable, till, by intreaties and tokens of submission, we have expiated the offence and are restored to favor. By the duchess's earnest solicitude to please, she destroyed her own purpose, and her obedience, like water flung upon a raging fire, only inflamed her husband's follies; and therefore, when he was in an ill humour, the duke vented his range on her. He did not care _how_ often _he quarrelled_ with, or, to speak more properly, how often he _insulted_ her; for that could not be called a quarrel wherein she acted no part but _that of suffering_. But though his displeasure was grievous to her, yet she could bear it better than his indifference--for resentment argues some degree of regard. But whilst she was breaking her heart for him, he passed his time in gallantry--though his affections were always the satire of a woman's virtue--the ruin of a woman's reputation.