Since I have lost that great-hearted person, gifted with a soul so noble, with an intelligence which combined something of the strength of the thought of Madame de Staël with the grace of the talent of Madame de La Fayette[265], I have never ceased, while mourning her, to reproach myself with any unevenness of temper with which I may sometimes have wounded hearts that were devoted to me. Let us keep a close watch upon our character! Let us remember that, with a profound attachment, we can nevertheless poison days which we would buy back again at the price of all our blood. When our friends have sunk into the grave, what means have we to repair our trespasses? Our useless regrets, our vain repentings, are those a remedy for the pain that we have given them? They would have preferred one smile from us during their life than all our tears after their death. The charming Clara[266] was at Ghent with her mother. We two made up bad couplets to the air of the _Tyrolienne._ I have held many pretty little girls on my knees who are young grandmothers to-day. When you have left a woman, married in your presence at sixteen years of age, if you return sixteen years later, you find her of the same age still: "Ah, madame, you have not put on a day!" No doubt: but it is the daughter to whom you are saying so, the daughter whom you will also lead up to the altar. But you, a sad witness to both hymens, you treasure up the sixteen years which you received at each union: a wedding-present which will hasten your own marriage with a white-haired lady, rather thin. [Sidenote: Marshal Victor.] Marshal Victor had come to join us, at Ghent, with an admirable simplicity: he asked for nothing, never teased the King with his assiduity; one scarcely saw him; I do not know whether he ever had the honour and the favour of being invited on a single occasion to His Majesty's dinner-party. I have met Marshal Victor since; I have been his colleague in office, and I have always perceived the same excellent nature. In Paris, in 1823, M. le Dauphin was very harsh to that honest soldier: it was very good of this Duc de Bellune to repay such easy ingratitude with such modest devotion[267]! Candour carries me away and touches me, even when, on certain occasions, it attains the final expression of its ingenuousness. For instance, the marshal told me of his wife's[268] death in the language of a soldier, and he made me weep: he pronounced coarse words so quickly, and changed them so chastely, that one might even have written them.