"
We have shown how she appeared to the eye of New England life; it may
not be uninteresting to give a letter to one of her friends, which
showed how the same appeared to her. It was not a friend with whom she
felt on such terms, that her intimacy with Burr would appear at all in
the correspondence.
* * * * *
"You behold me, my charming Gabrielle, quite pastoral, recruiting from
the dissipations of my Philadelphia life in a quiet cottage, with most
worthy, excellent people, whom I have learned to love very much. They
are good and true, as pious as the saints themselves, although they do
not belong to the Church,--a thing which I am sorry for; but then let
us hope, that, if the world is wide, heaven is wider, and that all
worthy people will find room at last. This is Virginie's own little,
pet, private heresy; and when I tell it to the Abbe, he only smiles;
and so I think, somehow, that it is not so very bad as it might be.
"We have had a very gay life in Philadelphia, and now I am growing
tired of the world, and think I shall retire to my cheese, like
Lafontaine's rat.
"These people in the country here in America have a character quite
their own, very different from the life of cities, where one sees, for
the most part, only a continuation of the forms of good society which
exist in the Old World.
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