"Ah! my mother, well had it been for your Madeline, if your lips had never uttered such a supplication; well had it been for her, if in the first bloom of life, ere her heart was sufficiently expanded to feel that tenderness which constitutes our greatest happiness or misery, the walls of a convent had immured her from a world, where her peace, her fame, were destined to be wrecked.
"My uncle was too generous to repeat a wish which gave such pain; he regretted ever having mentioned it, and strove to make amends for having done so, by reiterating the most solemn assurances of fulfilling the intentions he had before avowed towards me.
"Thus was the storm which threatened the peace of my mother, overblown; but, alas! the calm that succeeded it was to me of short duration. I had scarcely attained my sixteenth year when I was deprived of this inestimable parent. In the language of despair I wrote to my uncle, then at Paris, to inform him of this event; and at the same time enclosed a letter, written by my mother in her last hours, and, which I afterwards found contained a supplication not to permit
