of your Majesty, and above all to return you thanks for a
letter which is so little that of a king that it is all the more
precious and dear to me.
Your Majesty has no need to tell me that you have " felt to your sorrow, and only too well, what we suffer in losing that which we love." It can be seen, Sire, that you have experienced that cruel anguish by the feeling and truthful manner in which you speak to an afflicted heart and tell it that which is best adapted to its deplorable condition. All my friends are seeking, like you, to comfort me j they all tell me, like you, to distract my mind, but none have thought to add, as you have done, that " our reason is too weak to conquer the pain of a mortal wound ; we must grant something to nature and say to ourselves, especially at your age and mine, that it will not be long before we rejoin the object of our affections." Alas ! Sire, that is the only hope that comforts me, or rather, which makes me able to endure the few remaining days I have to live. . . .
I wrote a few years since to your Majesty, at a time when my frail body was daily growing feebler, that I desired nothing more upon my tomb than a stone with these words : "The Great Frederick honoured him with his kindness and his benefits." That stone and those words are to-day more than ever my desire : life, fame, even study, all have become indifferent and tasteless to me ; I feel nothing but the soli- tude of my soul, the void in my life. My brain, fatigued and almost exhausted by forty years of profound meditation, is to-day deprived of the resource which has so often soothed my troubles. I am left alone, abandoned to my melancholy ; and nature, blighted for me, offers me no object of attach- ment, nor even one of occupation.
But, Sire, why talk to you of my woes when you have to comfort those of so many others ? . . .
