I had embarked on a very serious tone in my last letters; it seemed that I had breathed the air of England; they will say that you had ruined my spirits. It is true that electricity belongs to every country, but indeed it could not be less remarkable that in France electricity is being dressed up in French fashion; everything here without exception bows to the empire of what is in vogue. We would not dare hope to make you submit to it entirely, but I am counting upon at least a little indulgence on your part for the present, and perhaps you will not have cause to repent of it.

Therefore I ask you, Monsieur, in all seriousness, whether it would not be possible to let our very frivolous nation glimpse, in electrical experiments, a utility based on luxury, which would make the public welcome these experiments with far more enthusiasm. If, for example, it could be imagined that the day would come, and is not perhaps far off, when with an apparatus that was very simple and always at hand, the flesh of animals that had just been killed could be sufficiently tenderized in three or four minutes so as to be eaten immediately, as though it had been kept for a long time. What pleasure, when one arrived in the countryside, to need only to have a capon killed in order to put it immediately on the spit! or not to have to wait a whole week for a leg of lamb, in order to find it tender!

A pretty little letter on a similar topic, as a gay conclusion to your collected works, would send the collection straight up to the heavens; our little masters and beautiful ladies would go wild over it for a week, and the provinces would resound with it for a long time. I do not even know how many foreign countries could be classed with our own frivolous provinces. I am, etc.