To ESTHER JULIA MADOX FORD
Reading edition
Très, très chère petite Princesse,
When you shall come to read English—which I hope will not be too soon—you shall find here adumbrated what the world seemed like to me just when you were preparing to enter it ..... a confused old world which your coming rendered so much clearer and dearer. And as these pages were written in the expectation of you—and for you!—I have thought better to leave them exactly as they were, bearing as they obviously do the traces of sufferings that, thank God, you never knew. And so, when you come to read them, give a tender thought to him to whom you have so often written—quitoubliejamé et qui t’aime de tou son coeur et encore beaucoupluss!
F. M. F.
New York, 21st June, 1929
What is love of one’s land?.... I don’t know very well. It is something that sleeps For a year, for a day, For a month—something that keeps Very hidden and quiet and still And then takes The quiet heart like a wave, The quiet brain like a spell, The quiet will Like a tornado—and that shakes The whole of the soul.