"So saying, she linked her arm into that of another Englishwoman, was lost in the crowd, and I did not see her again during the rest of the evening. That eccentric stranger was neither young nor pretty: I feel grateful to her, nevertheless, for her mysterious words. "Your newspapers continue to say the same things about me. I don't know what has possessed them. I ought to believe myself as forgotten as I wish to be. "I am writing to M. Thierry by this post. He is at Hyères and very ill. Not a word of reply from M. de La Bouillerie[701]." TO M. THIERRY[702] "ROME, 8 _January_ 1829. "I was much touched, monsieur, to receive the new edition of your Letters, with a line which proves that you have thought of me. If that line had been in your own hand, I should have hoped for the sake of my country that your eyes would reopen to the studies which your talent turns to such wonderful account. I am greedily reading, or rather re-reading, this too short work. I am making dog's ears to every page, in order the better to mark the passages upon which I wish to rely. I shall quote you very frequently, monsieur, in the work which I have been so many years preparing, on the two first dynasties. I shall shelter my ideas and my researches behind your authority; I shall often adopt your reforms in nomenclature; lastly, I shall have the good fortune to be almost invariably of your opinion, while departing, much despite of myself, no doubt, from the system put forth by M. Guizot; but I cannot, in common with that illustrious writer, overthrow the most authentic monuments, turn all the Franks into 'nobles' and 'free-men,' and all the Roman-Gauls into 'slaves of the Franks.' The Salic Law and the Ripuarian Law have a multitude of articles based on the difference of condition among the Franks: "'_St quis ingenuus ingenuum ripuarium extra solum vendiderit, etc., etc._' [Sidenote: Letter to Augustin Thierry.] "You know, monsieur, how eagerly I wished for you in Rome. We should have sat down on some ruins: there you would have taught me history; I, an old disciple, would have listened to my young master with the sole regret that I no longer had enough years before me to profit by his lessons: Tel est le sort de l'homme: il s'instruit avec l'âge. Mais que sert être sage, Quand le terme est si près[703]? "Those lines are from an unpublished ode, written by a man who is no more, by my good and old friend, Fontanes. Thus, monsieur, does everything remind me, among the remains of Rome, of all that I have lost, of the short time that still remains to me and of the brevity of those hopes which seemed so long to me in former days: _spem longam._