Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/102

1773] me in paradise — and you will be wrong ; to go there one must die, and that is what I wish to do. But come ; and write me often, often.

August 22, 1773.

I received yesterday your letter of the 10th, and it has done me good. If you only knew what I have suffered during the last eight days ! how wrung with grief my heart has been ! in what distress, in what alarms my life is spent ! I have no longer the liberty to free myself ; it is awful ; and it is not in the power of him I love to make my troubles cease. He knows them, he suffers from them, he is still more unhappy than I, because his soul is stronger, and has more energy, more sensibility than mine. For one whole year every moment of his life has been marked by misfor- tune ; he must die of it, yet he wills that I shall live. Oh ! my God ! my soul cannot suffice for what it feels and what it suffers. See my weakness, see how sorrow makes one selfish and indiscreet; I make you think of me, I sadden you perhaps. Ah ! forgive me ; this excess of confidence comes from my friendship, my tender friendship for you. You have shown me such kindness, such indulgence that it seems to me I cannot abuse it. If you, alas ! were to suffer, who could feel and share it more than I ? You see within my soul, you know what it has for you. Ah ! I feel, at the summit of woe, invoking death at every instant, that it will cost me a regret to leave you ; you console me, and yet I sink beneath the weight of my sorrows — No, no ! they are not mine that rend me, they are his, for which I have neither remedy nor consolation: that is the torture of a feeling and devoted soul. You have loved, you will under- stand and pity me.

After what you wrote to M. d'Alembert I counted on seeing you by the end of September, and now I find you