first wife, an indigent relation of his own, was received into the family of one of his sisters, as a dependant—she was beautiful and interesting, and my father being released, by death, from an engagement, in which his heart had never any share, married her—and

thought himself overpaid, by the felicity of his second marriage, for the little satisfaction he had found in the first.
But though he had in one instance, suffered his inclinations to conquer that aspiring temper, which, under less-powerful influence, would have led him to seek for a second great heiress, he seemed determined to apply himself with more assiduity to the attainment of power and honour, by other means—He had some capacity for business; was daring in forming schemes, and obstinate in adhering to them—proud, vindictive, and violent; with such a portion of national pride, as made him hold every other nation but his own in the utmost contempt—and, whenever they seemed likely to dispute the superiority of France, he was tempted to wish, like Caligula, that the people so presumptuous, had but one neck, than he might destroy them at a blow.
With this disposition, you will easily imagine, the inveteracy with which he regarded the English.—He held a high post in the war-department of France, in 1755, when those hostilities commenced, in which, for a series of years, the English had almost always

the advantage—events that added to national hatred, or a kind of personal and peculiar malignity—for of many of the operations in which his country failed of success, the Count of Bellegarde was the projector.
By a long course of defeat, however, his master, Louis the Fifteenth, and his co-adjutors, grew weary of his influence; and, in 1759, after the loss of Quebec, he was suddenly dismissed in disgrace.
Nor was this mortification the only one he was at that period fated to sustain.—A violent and infectious fever at the same time deprived him of his wife—and, wounded thus deeply, by public and domestic misfortune, he took the sudden resolution of quitting the world, and retiring to this castle, with my brother, my sister, and myself.
Hither, then, he came—leaving, at Paris, his eldest son, who had been some time in possession of his mother's fortune, and had lived entirely independent of. his father, and on no very friendly terms with him. To the young, gay, and dissipated D'Ermenonville (for he took the name of his mother) the austerity of a statesman, and conversation

of