Votre très humble et très obéissant serviteur, L’EVÊQUE DE MOULINS. STILTON, BELL INN, _ce_ 3 _Avril_ 1808. * * * * * [TRANSLATION] MY LORD, It is of the nature of your generous and kind soul to understand all that I feel. Deprived of all help and all consolation, plunged in the depths of misery for almost twenty years, Providence led me to Stilton to find in you what I had never dared to hope for without any merits, without any title. Near you, you alone deigned to give me comfort, support, and have secured me the help which I should never have dared to hope for. There is no language in which I can tell you what I feel. If you could only read into my heart you would see there all that it feels and with what gratitude it is filled. You have the kindness to show interest in my health. It has been very wretched since I last had the honour of seeing you. The blood complaint to which I am subject has exhausted me very much, and these last two days I have suffered a great deal; but as I have been used to suffering for many years, it does not prevent me from going about as usual, and it certainly will not stop me from profiting by your kindness to go and pay my respects to you at Milton the day which you name. The desire that your son has to make my acquaintance flatters me more than I can say, and it will give me great pleasure to pay my respects to him, and to express to him all that I feel and how indebted I am to the father whom he has the happiness to possess and who has become such for me. With the exception of Sundays, Thursday and Friday in Holy Week, that is to say that which precedes Eastertide, any day which you propose to me for coming to Milton will be free for me, for I can arrange to be free at about three or half-past three o’clock in the afternoon. I cannot tell you, my lord, how much I have been touched by the steps you have taken in trying to procure me a young prisoner to act as my servant. What I have suffered lately has proved to me still more how necessary it was to have somebody to wait on me. I hope very much that the steps which you have so kindly taken will not be without success, and it is to you only, if the affair proves successful, that I shall be indebted, and from then onwards I shall be doubly grateful. I take the liberty to say, that it was a real injustice to refuse me one, because, independently of the fact that they have not the right as far as I can make out, to take away the one I had, according to the passport which had been given to him, I can certify that the reasons they put forward for sending him back to prison, and especially that of his alleged taking of straw into the prison, is devoid of all truth; and with regard to this last reason, which to-day has been advanced for the first time, I believe that I can