The rake being
every morning drawn over the gravel to efface the marks left by the
coach wheels, I judged by the number of ruts of that of the persons
who had arrived in the afternoon.
This year, 1761, completed the heavy losses this good man had
suffered since I had had the honor of being known to him. As if it had
been ordained that the evils prepared for me by destiny should begin
by the man to whom I was most attached, and who was the most worthy of
esteem. The first year he lost his sister, the Duchess of Villeroy;
the second, his daughter, the Princess of Robeck; the third, he lost
in the Duke of Montmorency his only son; and in the Comte de
Luxembourg, his grandson, the last two supporters of the branch of
which he was, and of his name. He supported all these losses with
apparent courage, but his heart incessantly bled in secret during
the rest of his life, and his health was ever after upon the
decline. The unexpected and tragical death of his son must have
afflicted him the more, as it happened immediately after the king
had granted him for this child, and given him in promise for his
grandson, the reversion of the commission he himself then held of
the captain of the Gardes du Corps. He had the mortification to see
the last, a most promising young man, perish by degrees, from the
blind confidence of the mother in the physician, who giving the
unhappy youth medicines for food, suffered him to die of inanition.
Alas! had my advice been taken, the grandfather and the grandson would
both still have been alive.
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