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TO M. J. J. AMPÈRE. - Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2 [1861]

Edition used:

Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph. With large Additions. In Two Volumes (London: Macamillan, 1861). 2 vols.

Part of: Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2 vols.

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TO M. J. J. AMPÈRE.

My dear Friend,

I am told that the newspapers of Paris, copying an article in a Cherbourg paper, say that my brother has hurried from Nacqueville to this place, where I am very ill. I know that this news has alarmed my friends, and as I fear that it may reach you, I write to tell you the facts. Nothing of all this is true, except that my excellent Hippolyte, hearing of our melancholy solitude, travelled straight over the 800 miles that separated us, to shut himself up in our prison for a month.

As to my health, I will tell you its exact state. Bronchitis is a serious disorder, and may become a dangerous one. But there is no present or coming danger. My health has constantly improved during the month that I have been here. When I arrived I could not go a hundred yards without resting. Now I walk for more than an hour over the mountains that surround us. My physician sees already an improvement in the bronchial tubes. I do not; but certainly they are not worse. Such is the truth.

I hope that a winter in this place will cure me; but this cannot now be foretold. Hippolyte’s arrival was a happy interruption of our utter solitude and stagnation. Independently of disease, time itself is a heavy burden when one is away from home, without serious occupation for the mind, without the power of taking much exercise, far from one’s friends and family, and forced to live unceasingly on one’s own thoughts. The first weeks were very hard to bear; we contrived, however, to make our situation endurable. I sent for books, which I had long wished for, and never read. As I found reading painful to me in the evening, I obtained the services of a reader. I found at Cannes a good young man, looking forward, I suspect, to entering the Séminaire, who reads to us regularly for a part of the evening, while his mother knits in the antechamber. It is a great resource. But the greatest is the return of strength, the possibility of walking over the mountains, and above all the hope of cure, which reconciles me to the annoyance of remedies. . . .

We are not discontented with our life here, though it is trying. . . .

I write no more, as I must answer many friends who ask if I happen to be alive.