Letters of affaires love and courtship. Written to several persons of honour and quality; / by the exquisite pen of Monsieur de Voiture, a member of the famous French Academy established at Paris by Cardinall de Richelieu. English'd by J.D.

To the Same LETTER LXXXIII.

My Lord,

I Know no reason you have to quarrel with me, unlesse it be, that having your armes ready you could fall out with all the world, and foreseeing that the Spaniards will not find you work

long, you seek out occasions of new differences. It's a hard thing to be a Conquerour and just at the same time, and I perceive For∣titude and Justice, are two vertues seldome lodge together in the same inne. It is not many dayes since I writ you a letter so large that I thought you would not have found no leasure to read it, and I do not find my self guilty of having slipped any occasion I had to discharge my duty. Though I should not, my Lord, consider the infinite obligations I owe you, and were not to give some ac∣count of my self to the person of most honour I have ever known, yet could I not avoid writing to you, as being loath to give any cause of discontent to a man who at present is the most to be feared of any in France. Under pretence, that you have a many things lye on your hands, that you do the business of a Labourer, a Soldier and a General, while you are employed about the fortifying of a Camp, and the taking of a City, to see order and justice observed in an Army, and to make disciplinable a Nation that had never yet been so; you imagine that all others are at leasure, and that none but your self takes any paines. In the mean time, I assure you, that if I had nothing else to do here, then to hearken to those that tell news of you, and return it to others that enquire, I should not be much lesse employed then you are, and have very little time to write to you. Some who in other yeares were content with two or three houres discourse of you, spend now six in speaking of you, without the least weariness. Those who are dissatisfied with the Government, and those who are for it, are equally inquisi∣tive to know what you do, and there are not any to whom you are indifferent but those to whom France is such. While I write this, my Lord, I hear the Treaty with Landrecis is concluded, and that you are to march into it next Sunday. I praise God, and rejoyce with you, that you have convinced strangers it is not im∣possible, but that we may take some of their places, and that you have dissolved the inchantment which had hindred us from it for so many yeares. Lovain, Valentia, and Dole, had perswaded our enemies that we should never get any thing of them, and that the most we could do was to recover what they had taken from us. The most inconsiderable places seem'd to become impregnable assoo as we came before them; our Armies, which did well enough upon all other occasions, were ruined and absolutely disheartned assoon as they were engaged in a siege, and how great and victorious so∣ever your Fortune hath been, yet was there no ditch so shallow,

no work so weak but gave it some check. In fine, my Lord, you have exchanged that ill destiny, you have satisfyed those that would have sent you back to Dole that they mistook you. You have, as I may say, made your Cannon be heard as far as Brussels, and the noise hath made the Cardinal Infant to retreat as far as Gaunt, instead of advancing to the relief of a place, which you were going to take from him. But what I look on as most considerable in this Action, is, the Order, diligence, and security wherewith it was done. The very day you opened your Trenches, it might have been said Landrecis was ours, and though Picolo∣mini and all his Forces, which were such a terrour to us the last year, had brought along with them thither all the power of the Empire, they could not have taken it out of your hands. We were not wont to take that course for the reducing of places, and it may be said, that the first siege you laid was the first regular one that hath been seen in France.—

M— hath been very earnest with me to go along with him, but I have excused my self pretending affairs of great consequence, which I made him believe I had to do here. The affairs of so great consequence is a siege: I have laid to a place that is very pleasant, and excellently well scituated. I have drawn my lines of circum∣vallation about it, after the way of Holland and yours, and Pico∣lomini should not hinder me from taking it. Things being car∣ryed on so far it would have troubled me extreamly to raise the siege, for that, among Conquerours, such as we are, is a thing in∣supportable.

Iuly 3. 1634.