After this he was silent; and then, from time to time,continually repeating She is dead, I shall never see her more, he returned to lamentations and tears, and continued as a man bereft of reason. He told me, he had not often received letters from her during his absence, but that he knew her too well to be surprised at it, and was sensible how shy and timorous she was of writing; he made no doubt but she would have married him upon his return; he considered her as the most amiable and constant of her sex; he thought himself tenderly beloved by her; he lost her the moment he expected to be united to her for ever; all these thoughts threw him into so violent an affliction, that I own I was deeply touched with it.
Nevertheless I was obliged to leave him to go to the King, but promised to return immediately; accordingly I did, and I was never so surprised as I was to find him entirely changed from what I had left him; he was standing in his chamber, his face full of fury, sometimes walking, sometimes stopping short, as if he had been distracted. Come, says he, and see the most forlorn wretch in the world; I am a thousand times more unhappy than I was a while ago, and what I have just heard of madam de Tournon is worse than her death.
I took what he said to be wholly the effect of grief, and could not imagine that there could be anything worse than the death of a mistress one loves and is beloved by; I told him, that so far as he kept his grief within bounds, I approved of it, and bore a part in it; but that I should no longer pity him, if he abandoned himself to despair and flew from reason. I should be too happy if I had lost both my reason and my life, cried he; madam de Tournon was false to me, and I am informed of her unfaithfulness and treachery the very day after I was informed of her death; I am informed of it at a time when my soul is filled with the most tender love, and pierced with the sharpest grief that ever was; at a time when the idea of her in my
