Oh! my dear friend, what a dismal winter have I just passed! I own to you that the probability of my exile lasting another year distracts me. – To live sixty leagues from Paris, is it life? – Shut up in an old castle, with a mother-in-law who detests me, and who is as tiresome, as she is godly, deaf, cross, and quarrelsome; and to all this ‘the torment of neighbours;’ such shocking men! – Women so dressed! – Such behavior and fashions! – The least insupportable amongst them calls her husband my friend before all company. Judge then of the rest. Moreover, the fashionable amusements here are walking, fishing, reading, and playing at Loto. You see how well this suits me, and how I must be diverted. I am so altered, so horridly thin – If they will force me to spend another winter here, I declare to you there are no extremities, into which I shall not be ready to run. – My debts in two years, it is true, amounted to forty thousand livres, but did I not bring Mons. de Germeuil fifty thousand livres a year; and has he not himself gamed away upwards of five hundred thousand? Does he think, he alone has the right to ruin himself? He has just treated me in a manner, which raises my resentment to the height. I thought proper to write, and inform him it was my desire to have my daughter taken out of the convent, and sent to me. He answered me bluntly, that I ought to give up that fancy; that his daughter would be much better educated in a convent, than with me: in a word, he flatly refused me. You know I am not naturally fond of children. Besides, a little girl of six years old could not be any great resource.