Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow TO M. FRESLON. - Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2

Return to Title Page for Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2

Search this Title:

Also in the Library:

Subject Area: Political Theory

TO M. FRESLON. - 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.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


TO M. FRESLON.

I send to you, my dear friend—not a letter, for where can I find matter for one?—but a bulletin—one I am sure that will please you. Since I wrote to you, my recovery has astonished as well as delighted me by its rapidity. Pray God against a relapse, and my hopes will be greater than they have yet been.

One proof of my returning strength is that I can enjoy reading. They are reading to me the memoirs of Miot de Melitot. Do you know them? They ought to be in every library.

I am reading to myself, and therefore slowly, the “Autobiography of Gibbon,” in English, and with the greatest interest; but I venture to do so only for short intervals. Do not you agree with me that nothing is more interesting than the memoirs of celebrated men when they can be trusted? One always hopes to find the secret of the fine machines which have worked so well. Often one is deceived. Gibbon is evidently sincere. It shows how much may be done by a man with an extraordinary memory, who, in the leisure and the quiet given by a high social position and an independent fortune, passes forty years at work, reads all that has ever been written on an almost boundless subject, retains it, and afterwards quietly, and without hurrying himself, brings together all the results, and finds that, almost without having been aware of what he was doing, he has produced one of the greatest works of modern literature. What was least to be expected is that this man, capable of such patient toil (he gives a list of the readings of a month; in a whole year so employed, he would have done more than would have been done by a whole convent of Benedictines)—that this man, I say, laborious to a degree which generally excludes other great qualities, should, when he came to compose, have proved a concise, nervous, and animated writer. But why am I talking to you of Gibbon? Adieu!