Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/23

8 destined in this world, and Spain was not worthy to possess a M. de Mora." And again (July 8th) : " There are lives on which depend the fate of empires. Hannibal, when he heard of the defeat and death of his brother Hasdrubal, a man of greater worth than himself, did not weep, but he said, ' Now I know what will be the fate of Carthage.' I say the same on the death of M. de Mora."

M. de Mora came to France about the year 1766 ; it was then that Mile, de Lespinasse knew him and loved him. He was absent at various times, but always returned to her. Finally, his lungs were attacked and his native climate was ordered for him. He left Paris, never to re-enter it, on Friday, August 7, 1772. Mile, de Lespinasse, philosopher and freethinker none the less, was on one point as supersti- tious as any Spanish woman, as any loving woman ; and she did not fail to note that having quitted Paris on a Friday, it was on a Friday also that he left Madrid (May 6, 1774), and that he died at Bordeaux on Friday, the 27th of the same month. When he left Paris the passion of Mile, de Les- pinasse for him and that which he returned to her had never been more ardent. An idea of it may be gained from the fact that during a journey which M. de Mora made to Fontainebleau in the autumn of 1771 he wrote twenty-two letters to her in ten days of absence. Matters were estab- lished on this tone, and the pair had parted with every promise and every pledge between them, when Mile, de Les- pinasse, in the month of September, 1772, met the Comte de Guibert for the first time, at Moulin-Joh, the country- house of M. Watelet.

M. de Guibert, then about twenty-nine years of age, was a young colonel for whom society had lately roused itself to a pitch of enthusiasm. He had recently published an " Essay on Tactics," preceded by a survey of the state of political and