TO THE MANES OF MLLE. DE LESPINASSE.
By D'ALEMBERT.
O you who can no longer hear me, you I have so tenderly and so constantly loved, you by whom I thought for a while I was beloved, you whom I preferred to all things, you who could have been to me all things had you so willed it ; alas ! if you still can feel, in that abode of death for which you longed and which will soon be mine, behold my sorrow and my tears, the solitude of my soul, the awful void which you have caused, the cruel abandonment in which you have left me!
But why speak to you of the solitude in which I am, since you are no more ? Ah ! my unjust and cruel friend, had you willed it that crushing solitude might have begun for me while you stiU existed. Why did you repeat to me, ten months before your death, that I was always what you treasured most, the object most necessary to your happiness, the only one which bound you to life, when you were on the eve of proving to me, so cruelly, the contrary ? For what reason, which I can neither imagine nor suspect, did that feeling, so tender for me, which perhaps you felt at the time you assured me of it, change suddenly to estrangement and aversion ? What had I done to displease you ? Why did you not complain to me if you had anything to complain of? You would have seen to the bottom of my heart, that heart
