Page:Letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse.djvu/343

318 day, bursting into tears, to her friends gathered around her at the moment of her death; "we may apply to ourselves the words of Scripture: 'The Lord hath smitten the shepherd, and the flock is scattered.' "

Eliza's mind, kindly and animated as it was, united to those qualities precision and solidity. She had never cultivated the exact sciences ; but she studied moral questions, she loved sound metaphysics, and read Montaigne much. She knew Locke, before Rousseau, under pleasanter forms [in "Émile"], had made him pass into our language. She took delight in Tacitus, and in Montesquieu. One of the living authors whom she esteemed the most was the Abbé de Condillac. All that was strong pleased her nature; all that was subtle or profound pleased her mind.

So many natural and acquired advantages might have justified in Eliza an emotion of pride, but she never had it. She who felt and judged so well of the minds of others seemed to ignore her own, and even to distrust it ; thus she wrote nothing for the public. If sometimes her soul needed to pour itself out, either for her own sake or for that of her friends, she took the greatest care that the secret was known only to them, and she exacted from their friendship that her letters should be either returned to her or destroyed. Divers little works composed by her are, apparently, lost forever, such as three chapters in the style of the "Sentimental Journey," a great number of Synonyms, an Apology for her faults, especially that facility for enthusiasm and infatuation with which she was reproached, — a charming bit of writing addressed to me, of which I was too scrupulous to take a copy. She had also begun the memoirs of her life, or rather of her passion for Gronsalve; for she began them at that epoch, as if her life had dated, to her eyes, from the moment only when she knew him. But what are most to