You told me, my dear daughter, that your heart is too sensitive. I see, by your letters that that is too true. A keen awareness of our own faults is good because it leads us to avoid them in the future. But to be very sensitive to, and afflicted by, the faults of other people,—that is not good. They are the ones who should be sensitive and afflicted by what they have done wrong. As for us, we should preserve that tranquillity that is the just portion of innocence and virtue. But you say that “Ingratitude is a terrible evil.” That is true—an evil to the ungrateful—but not to the benefactors. You have conferred kindnesses on those whom you believed worthy of them. You have therefore done your duty, because it is our duty to be charitable, and you should be content with that, and happy at the thought of it. If they are ungrateful, it is their crime and not yours, and they should be miserable when they reflect on the baseness of their conduct towards you. If they do wrong, reflect that even though they may have been your equals beforehand, they have now placed themselves beneath you. If you exact a vengeance by punishing them, you restore them to the state of equality that they had lost. But if you were to forgive them, without any punishment, you would fix them in the low state into which they have fallen, and from which they can never emerge, without true repentance and full reparation. Follow then, my very dear and always amiable daughter, the good resolution that you have so wisely taken, to continue to fulfill all your duties as good mother, good wife, good friend, good neighbor, good Christian, etc. (without forgetting to be a good daughter to your papa), and to neglect and forget, if you can, the wrongs you may be suffering at present. And be sure that, given time, the rectitude of your conduct will win over the minds of even the worst people, and still more the minds of those people whose nature is basically good, and who also are endowed with good sense, even though they may be right now somewhat led astray by the trickery of others. Then all of them will ask with compunction for the return of your friendship and they will become in the future your most zealous friends.

I am aware that I have written a great deal of very bad French here; perhaps that will repulse you, you who write this charming language with so much purity and elegance. But if you finally succeed in deciphering my obscure, awkward and inaccurate expressions, perhaps you will obtain at least the kind of pleasure that one derives from explaining riddles, or discovering secrets.