I have not received a letter from you since the March 6 letter, to which I replied on the 1st, the 21st, and the 29th of June, but I am afraid that you have not received this reply; it was in a package with a letter from M. the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, two from M. and Mme Brillon, and another from me addressed to M. your grandson. M. Brillon wanted to have it countersigned in a general inspections office, and it was sent to M. Ruellan's address in Le Havre, who had notified me that he had a vessel ready to depart for Philadelphia. Two days after the package's departure, M. Ruellan warns me that the ship has another destination. I write to him again to return the package to me, but he replies, and he has done so again since then, that he never received it. Searches were done in vain at the post office; perhaps it has been sent to you from the packet-boat. But do not accuse me of not writing to you in so long. I will in any case repeat part of what I had written you.

On May 31, the man in red was judged and completely acquitted, as well as the Comte and the Comtesse de Cagliostro; the Lady la Motte was whipped, branded, her head shaved, and locked up in the Salpétrière hospital. The husband would have been also whipped and branded if he had been willing; but he preferred to escape. Le Vilette, their accomplice, is banished from the Kingdom, and Mlle d'Oliva is banished from the court. On the following day, the Prince Bishop made the mistake of not sending to the King early enough his resignation from his position as Grand Chaplain and from the knighthood of the Holy Ghost, associated with this post. M. de Breteuil asked him for both of them on behalf of the King, who exiled the prelate to his abbey de La Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne. M. de Montmorency, Bishop of Metz and future cardinal, has succeeded M. de Rohan as Grand Chaplain.

According to custom observed from time immemorial, there are all kinds of great and random commentaries on the judgement and the orders of the King. The enlightened, the pious, and the charitable tenderly bemoan the cardinal, his imprisonment, his suffering, and the orders of the King, who is even attributed with attitudes which do not seem to have occurred to him. Cagliostro says that he would not be surprised if the cardinal's thigh were amputated, who in truth had all the possible comforts in prison and who is doing quite well. The hard-hearted, the inhuman, are surprised that in an affair in which the most severe criticism cannot find the slightest fault in the Queen; in which she and consequently the King are terribly hurt; in which the latter ensured that the laws of the Kingdom were scrupulously observed; whereas the cardinal, whose former conduct was not irreproachable, has demonstrated and admitted the most unforgivable blundering, carelessness, imprudence, and heedlessness; these people are surprised that the Parliament, instead of at least recommending that he should be more careful, had on the contrary cleared him, that is, made him triumph as much as possible. The same people think that the King might form the harshest impressions of the magistrates and believe that, being so unfair to him, they should be even more unfair for the people; and that if his spirit, so removed from despotism, does not deter this, he should respond by bringing justice himself or by seeing that justice is done by the odious means of commissions.

Madame de la Motte's judgement was executed around June 20. She fought vigorously to avoid the red-hot iron, so that it is claimed that she is branded in an entirely different place than where it is required by law. But in the Salpétrière she has been converted; she is the edification of the entire establishment; she will be canonized, and the Abbé de la Roche is already composing her panegyric.

Your former secretary M. de la Motte has done very poorly to not have followed you. He has died of a terrible fever, and he is mourned by all those who knew him.

According to your wishes, I had communicated the political part of your March 6 letter, where you talk about the current state of America, to M. the Duc de la Rochefoucauld. He has asked me permission, on behalf of an American to whom he had shown it, to have it published in a gazette as an extract of one of your letters, in order to reply to the English newspapers. Although I saw nothing preventing it, I did not want to do it without your permission; write me if you consent to it, or, what would be better, send me a piece written for this purpose.

I was recently loaned an English book entitled Observations on a late publication intituled: Thoughts on executive justice to which is added a letter containing remarks on the same. This letter is yours, my dear friend, and it gave me great pleasure. I recognized in it several questions which we had debated together; however, you say that it is better that one thousand guilty men go free than to risk executing one innocent man, and you add that this principle has never been refuted by anyone. Doubtless it has in its favor the first cry of humanity, which is provoked only by the frightful misfortune that it represents, without thinking of those which it can cause. I do not believe the proposition to be rigorously true; I even think that the slightest examination suffices to show that it would overthrow any kind of criminal justice, without which no society could subsist, for such a system of justice must admit proof, and however convincing these are required to be, they can only be probabilities. In a large number of criminal trials judged by men, probability must necessarily lead them sometimes to error and to the condemnation of an innocent man. It must be risked, or there can be no criminal justice. It is a problem, a terrible one without doubt, but one which must be included with those brought on by society, and to which we must submit in order to benefit from its advantages. A thousand guilty men set free will kill, perhaps cruelly, ten honest men, as innocent as the one whose fate concerns you. To claim therefore that it is better that a thousand guilty men escape than to risk the death of one innocent, is to say that it is better that ten innocent men die than only one. I agree with everything else that you wrote; I aspire like any good citizen to a more just proportion between punishments and crimes, and I believe that with a better procedure, not only would fewer innocents perish, but a much larger number of criminals would be punished. This would be especially so if the legislator took fair measures to insulate himself from all the efforts which families make to save the culprits, families who are stigmatized by the most absurd prejudice when one of their members is punished for a crime.

Our port in Cherbourg is advancing; there have already been ten cones sunk. The King made a trip there, and on his return he supped and slept in the beautiful house in Gaillon where the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld received us so well. Everywhere he passed, he was met with the greatest joy; in all respects he conducted himself so as to make himself loved. It is to be hoped that he will go see the hospital for disabled soldiers presently.

I apologize to M. Jefferson with regard to the part of his book where he talks about negroes; I had judged it only on what I had heard. I read it; it seemed fair and very sensible. The translation has not yet appeared, the Abbé Morellet is so lazy!

I told you in my March 15 letter about a memoir by M. Du Paty, a magistrate of the Bordeaux Parliament, in favor of three men condemned to the wheel by the Paris Parliament. M. Segnier, Attorney General, read a long suit [ ] ago, and Parliament condemned the memoir to be burned at the hands of the executioner for containing false and calumnious facts, and articles injurious to the magistrature and implicating the Royal authority. He ordered an inquest to investigate and pursue its authors. M. Du Paty wrote to the Attorney General that he was the author; he has been served with a summons [ ] This affair is quite serious and difficult, and the Parliament is very divided in their opinions.

M. Linguet, made Baron by the Emperor, whom he has so well, or so poorly, defended, is in Paris, and has asked M. le Duc d'Aiguillon for an enormous sum for honoraria and fees in this great affair, where he had been his lawyer so long ago; these days he must plead his cause himself. He had still two other very strange suits with Pankouke, for a newspaper of which he was [   ] did not do and which he claims to be paid, and with someone named De Quesne, formerly his [agent]?

The news of your paper money has made a great sensation here; you are pitied for having had to employ this method. It is also claimed that your bank has stopped, but I know that this is not true.

My excellent wife and daughter embrace you as tenderly as possible; our common friends ask you to remember them, I never see them without their asking after you. The opportunities to write you and to hear from you are quite rare and insufficient; where has the time gone when I saw you almost every day? Adieu, my dear friend, I love you and embrace you with all my heart