Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. - Charles Dickens

I wish you to know you have been the last dream of my soul. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing…

But I wish you to know that you inspired it. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into the fire.

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years it was a splendid laugh!

The difficulty of writing English is most tiresome to me. My God! If only we could write this beautiful language of France at all times!