“I was scarcely twelve years old, when M. de La Fayette was proposed to my mother for one of us. He himself was only fourteen. His extreme youth, no parents to guide him,—having lost all his near relatives, and having no one in whom he could repose confidence,—a large fortune already in his possession, which my mother looked upon as a dangerous gift—all these considerations made her at first refuse him, notwithstanding the good opinion she had acquired of his personal qualities. She persisted several months in her refusal; but my father was not discouraged, and as one of his friends observed to him that my mother had gone too far ever to change her mind, he did justice to her straightforwardness in the midst of his anger against her. ‘You do not know Madame d’Ayen,’ he said; ‘however far she may have gone, you will see that she will give way like a child if you prove to her that she is in the wrong; but, on the other hand, she will never yield if she does not see her mistake.’ “Accordingly, when she was told that her daughter would not leave her during the first years of her marriage, and that it would only be celebrated at the end of two years, after M. de La Fayette had finished his education, she accepted him whom she cherished ever after as the most tenderly beloved son, whom she valued from the first moment that she became acquainted with him, and who alone could have sustained the strength of my heart after having lost her. “It was some time after my mother’s consent that I was spoken to of M. de La Fayette, towards whom I was already attracted by feeble forerunners of that deep and tender affection which every day has united us more and more in the midst of all the vicissitudes of this life, in the midst of the blessings and misfortunes which have filled it for the last twenty-four years. “With what pleasures I learned that, for more than a year, my mother had looked upon him and loved him as a son! She told me all the good she had heard with regard to him, all she thought of him herself, and I saw that he already felt for her that filial affection which was to be the blessing of my life. She tried to calm my poor weak brain, which was over-excited by the importance of the coming event. She taught me to pray—she prayed herself—for the blessings of Heaven on my future happiness. As I had the happiness of remaining with her, my only feelings were those of deep emotion. I was then fourteen and a half.” La Fayette’s wife brought to him a fortune, which, together with his own inheritance, gave him a yearly revenue of $37,500.