Your letter from Aix, my daughter, is droll enough. At least, read your letters over again before
sending them, allow yourself to be surprised by the pretty things that you have put into them and
console yourself by this pleasure for the trouble you have had in writing so many. Then you have
kissed all of Provence, have you? There would be no satisfaction in kissing all Brittany, unless one
liked to smell of wine. . . . Do you wish to hear the news from Rennes? A tax of a hundred
thousand crowns has been imposed upon the citizens; and if this sum is not produced within four-and-twenty hours, it is to be doubled, and collected by the soldiers. They have cleared the houses
and sent away the occupants of one of the great streets and forbidden anybody to receive them on
pain of death; so that the poor wretches (old men, women near their confinement, and children
included) may be seen wandering around and crying on their departure from this city, without
knowing where to go, and without food or a place to lie in. Day before yesterday a fiddler was
broken on the wheel for getting up a dance and stealing some stamped paper. He was quartered
after death, and his limbs exposed at the four corners of the city. Sixty citizens have been thrown
into prison, and the business of punishing them is to begin tomorrow. This province sets a fine
example to the others teaching them above all that of respecting the governors and their wives,
and of never throwing stones into their garden.1
Yesterday, a delightful day, Madame de Tarente visited
these wilds; there is no question about preparing a chamber
or a collation; she comes by the gate, and returns the same
way. . . .