Oh, my dear friend! What a day is this, which has just past! … It is done! Flora is married … At length she has pronounced the dreadful word which engages her for ever … Her fate is fixed, independent of me for the future … and it is for ever! … There are circumstances, without which we should not know the excess of our sensibility. She who has never seen her daughter married, or at the point of death, can have no perfect idea what it is to be a mother … I cannot describe to you all that has passed in my mind since yesterday. Certainly I see with different eyes, I have a different heart and another way of thinking; I am no longer the same person! … In one moment I have discovered my daughter dearer to me than any thing on earth, and that all my happiness depends on our future fortune. I have no idea how it should happen, that her education has not always been the principal concern of my life. I am continually reproaching myself for having neglected it, and for suffering her to marry so young; and above all with having made a choice, which at this time appears to me full of inconveniences. The conduct of her mother-in-law comes back to my memory under the most odious colours. I blush to hear my daughter call her mother … If I had been my own mistress this morning, if I could have broke the engagement, my child should have been free; she should still have been mine … Mons. de Valcy appears to me nothing more than a coxcomb, without sense and without character … Add to all these painful ideas the presence of Madame de Gerville, who has been here all day, and who triumphs in her own power, and the vexation she has given me … Ah! it is at this moment that I feel, in the anguish of my heart, how happy I might have been, had I followed your advice! I should then have gained the confidence of Mons. de Limours.