My Dear Marquis: In reading your very friendly and acceptable letter,
which came to hand by the last mail, I was, as you may well suppose,
not less delighted than surprized to meet the plain American words,
"my wife." A wife! Well, my dear Marquis, I can hardly refrain from
smiling to find you are caught at last. I saw by the eulogium you
often made on the happiness of domestic life in America, that you had
swallowed the bait, and that you would as surely be taken, one day or
another, as that you were a philosopher and a soldier.
[Footnote 28: From a letter, written at Mount Vernon on April 25,
1788, and addrest to the Marquis de Chastellux, author of "Travels in
North America," and a major-general in the army of Rochambeau, who
served under Washington in the American Revolution.]
So your day has at length come. I am glad of it, with all my heart and
soul. It is quite good enough for you. Now you are well served for
coming to fight in favor of the American rebels, all the way across
the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible contagion, domestic
felicity, which, like the smallpox or the plague, a man can have only
once in his life, because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in
America; I know not how you manage these matters in France), for his
whole lifetime. And yet, after all, the worst wish which I can find in
my heart to make against Madame de Chastellux and yourself is that you
may neither of you ever get the better of this same domestic felicity,
during the entire course of your mortal existence.
If so wonderful an event should have occasioned me, my dear Marquis,
to write in a strange style, you will understand me as clearly as if I
had said, what in plain English is the simple truth, "Do me the
justice to believe that I take a heartfelt interest in whatsoever
concerns your happiness." And, in this view, I sincerely congratulate
you on your auspicious matrimonial connection. I am happy to find that
Madame de Chastellux is so intimately connected with the Duchess of
Orleans; as I have always understood that this noble lady was an
illustrious example of connubial love, as well as an excellent pattern
of virtue in general.
While you have been making love under the banner of Hymen, the great
personages in the north have been making war under the inspiration,
or rather under the infatuation, of Mars. Now, for my part, I humbly
conceive that you have acted much the best and wisest part; for
certainly it is more consonant to all the principles of reason and
religion, natural and revealed, to replenish the earth with
inhabitants than to depopulate it by killing those already in
existence. Besides, it is time for the age of knight-errantry and mad
heroism to be at an end. Your young military men, who want to reap the
harvest of laurels, do not care, I suppose, how many seeds of war are
sown; but for the sake of humanity it is devoutly to be wished, that
the manly employment of agriculture, and the humanizing benefits of
commerce, would supersede the waste of war and the rage of conquest;
that the swords might be turned into plowshares, the spears into
pruning-hooks, and, as the Scriptures express it, the "nations learn
war no more."
Now I will give you a little news from this side of the water, and
then finish. As for us, we are plodding on in the dull road of peace
and politics. We, who live in these ends of the earth, only hear of
the rumors of war like the roar of distant thunder. It is to be hoped
that our remote local situation will prevent us from being swept into
its vortex.