My friend's writings take you by a happy road: the mind experiences a sense of well-being, and finds itself in an harmonious situation where everything charms and nothing wounds. M. de Fontanes incessantly revised his productions; none was more convinced than that master of the old days of the excellence of the maxim, "Hasten slowly." What, then, would he say to-day when, both morally and physically, we exert ourselves to do away with distances, and when we think we can never go fast enough. M. de Fontanes preferred to travel at the will of a delicious measure. You have read what I said of him when I found him in London; the regrets which I expressed then I must repeat now: life obliges us ever to weep in anticipation or in remembrance. M. de Bonald had a shrewd intelligence; his ingenuity was mistaken for genius; he had dreamt out his political metaphysics with the Army of Condé, in the Black Forest, in the same way as those Jena and Göttingen professors who have since marched at the head of their pupils and let themselves be killed for the liberty of Germany. An innovator, although he had been a musketeer under Louis XVI., he looked upon the ancients as children in politics and literature; and he maintained, while he was the first to employ the fatuousness of the language now in use, that the Grand-master of the University was "not yet sufficiently advanced to understand that." Chênedollé, with knowledge and talent, not native but acquired, was so sad that he nicknamed himself the "Crow[404]:" he went freebooting in my works. We had made a compact: I yielded him my skies, my mists, my clouds; but it was arranged that he should leave me my zephyrs, my waves, and my forests. I am now speaking only of my literary friends; as to my political friends, I do not know whether I shall tell you about them: principles and speeches have sunk abysses between us!