248 A Century of Family Letters [CHAP, xvn 



fle Broglie 1 yesterday and saw her. She looked ill, and 

 very low, but she talked with great calmness of the illness 

 and death of her daughter, who suffered, poor child, very 

 much before her death. The economy of the Citizen King 

 is talked of, which is as it should be. A brother of Copley 

 Fielding, the water-colour painter, gives lessons to the royal 

 family, and he says the King bargains for a sheet of drawing- 

 paper. Paris looks very handsome and we have a bright 

 sun for some hours in the day ; on our way here we paid a 

 visit at St Denis to all Sismondi's old friends, Bagobert and 

 Pepin le Bref. It is an interesting walk among the dead. 

 I know nothing more of Paris, except that the ladies' 

 bonnets are very small; they wear feathers in them. I feel 

 very anxious respecting the Reform question and all that 

 hangs to it in England, also of the cholera. I trust that 

 we shall hear from one of you, it would be a great treat to 

 have a few lines from yourself ; but you have too much to do 

 for me to ask it, and sometimes, when I am very disinter- 

 ested, even to wish it. God bless you, and preserve your 



health. 



Yours, dear Mackintosh, affectionately, 



F. ALLEN. 



Mackintosh died on May 30th, 1832, having never 

 recovered from the effects of the accident mentioned in the 

 previous letter. A year before Jessie Sismondi had written 

 of him to her sister Bessy (5th Feb., 1831) : 



I think of his life which I now look on as almost finished 

 with the greatest pity ; not without blame, it is true, but it 

 is almost lost in pity. He had an understanding to compre- 

 hend all the beauties of the high moral feelings and those of 

 affection, but not the heart ever to feel them, so that he 

 knew their heaven, sighed for it, yet, as if a curse was on 

 him, could never put his foot into it. He loved passionately 

 and fondly only one person [his wife] in the world, and she 



1 Albertine, the daughter of Madame de Stael, married to the 

 Due de Broglie. She was distinguished by her beauty in youth, and 

 in her maturity by a deep and somewhat evangelical type of religion. 



