I criticise you, I disapprove of you; why that difference?
Can you believe that it is only one year since we first knew
each other ? It seems to me impossible.
Wednesday evening, July 14, 1773.
Ah ! how amiable you can be, and how you surprise me by returning to me, being so occupied, so dissipated as you are ! How is it that you even think of one who can have no other merit in your eyes than that of seeming capable of loving and suffering ? Of what use to you are those sad faculties ? You have no need of being loved, and you would be sorry to make me suffer ; what value can you place upon an intimacy where all the advantage is on my side only ?
You ask me questions which I am not in a state to answer. Alas ! one must needs be calm to answer the questions of in- difference. Sorrow, the duration of suffering, have given me a species of stupidity which deprives me of the power of thinking ; all the reason left to me is enough (and no more) to judge myself, to condemn my emotions, and be sorry for all my feelings. My soul has continual fever with par- oxysms which lead me often to delirium. Oh ! if it were true that excess of ill gives birth to good, I might hope for some relief. No, I can no longer bear the diverse agitations that rend my heart, but I reproach myself for the weakness that drags me into showing you what I suffer. It seems to me that I cannot excite your interest; I have no claim on your sensibilities ; and if I had, it is not with my sorrows that I ought to nourish them. No, you owe me nothing, and I will prove it to you : I detest, I abhor, the fatality which forced me to write to you that first note; yet at this very moment, perhaps, it is dragging me onward with the same power. I did not wish to speak to you of myself; I meant simply to thank you
