to share them.

"I know, also, that you were surrounded by snares, and that they who
extend them for you are men of wicked ways. They believe they have
destroyed the germs of some virtues, as they succeeded in arresting
the progress of my education; but there remain to me uprightness of
principle, courage, a tendency to good, and the desire of preserving
the glory of my nation. Louis XIV. could boast of no more.

"I know that I have been pictured to you as one who has forgotten his
dignity, and who is the slave of a love for wine. Alas! that beverage
that was forced upon me in my tenderest youth, by the ferocious
Simon, has served to fortify my constitution in the course of a most
painful life, even as it did that of the great Henry IV.; and, if I
have been addicted to the use of it in this place, it was for my
health's sake, to preserve which a more refined method would not have
so well suited me.

"The use of tobacco was recommended to me in 1797, at Baltimore, also
on account of my health. I have profited by it. It has occasionally
served to dissipate my sense of weariness, and the thin vapour has
often caused me to forget that life might be breathed away from my
lips almost as readily.

"I have wished, my dear sister, to speak to you as a brother. Whatever
may be the force of a custom preserved during nineteen years, I shall
know how, in sharing the fatigues of my troops, to deprive myself of
what is a pastime to them. Other occupations will but too easily
absorb me entirely. Cease to see by any other vision than your own.
Trust to the evidence of your own senses, and no other. I have
learned, through a long series of misfortunes, how to be a man, and to
be upon my guard against my fellowmen. Truth is not apt to penetrate
under golden fringes. It is, however, my divinity; and henceforward,
my sister, it will dwell with us. I grant the right of having it told
to me. It will never offend a monarch who, having contracted the habit
of bearing it, will have the courage to heed it for the benefit of his
people.

"I dispersed the last calumny which perversity has aimed at me, when
it declared that your brother was still in the United States. No; I
had long left it when my evil destiny conducted me from Brazil (as you
will see in my "Memoirs") to France, which is anything for me but the
promised land. Heaven, to whom my eyes and hopes were ever raised,
will not fail to have in its keeping certain witnesses to my
exis