tal. The point in question is one which could not reasonably be expected to exercise any influence upon the child, at any age, much less at the present age of this infant. The point itself is, however, misstated. The respondent and her parents, instead of denying, concur in the truth of the general observation contained in the suggestion, that the marriage contract, " in good fortune or bad, in sickness or health, in happiness or misery, binds a wife to her husband, a mother to the father of her children." This is not the true point of difference between her and the relator. The point of difference is, whether his conduct has not been such as to dissolve the force of this obligation; for however binding the marriage contract, in a general point of view, there can be no doubt that the conduct of either party to it, may be such as to absolve the other from the obligation of continuing in his society.

In her original return she took occasion to submit to the court, that considerations of this sort were immaterial to the purpose of the present hearing. As was then intimated, she would willingly have been spared the necessity of detailing, with particularity, or even noticing generally, the series of wrongs which have induced her to adopt her final resolution of separation from the relator's society. But the course pursued by the relator (of which, though she deeply regrets it, she does not complain) leaves her now no alternative. To enter upon the subject must, she greatly fears, aggravate the unkindness of feeling of the relator and his friends, towards the mother of this child. In discussing it, moreover, the privacy of domestic life must be painfully intruded upon. This being neither an application for a divorce, nor for the restitution of conjugal rights, the whole subject is, in a great measure, if not altogether, foreign to the present inquiry. But the forbearance which, in the first instance, induced her to withhold it, can no longer be exercised with due respect to the court, to her parents, or to herself. A stranger in this community, seeking to find in it an asylum of quiet and retirement, she finds herself, at the age of twenty-one years, arraigned, with an unusual parade of publicity, as a violator of the domestic relations of a wife and a mother, and charged with having sacrificed her duty in both relations, to the indulgence of a filial devotion the most blind and the most capricious. The erroneous manner in which this part of the case has been presented, on the part of the relator, compels her, with regret, to bring it thus publicly to the notice of the court.

The causes of her separation from the relator were a series of acts of systematic ill-treatment and oppression, accompanied and aggravated by a total disregard, on his part, of the sympathies, and neglect of the attentions, without which there can be no happiness in the marriage state. However occasional acts of oppression and ill-treatment might have been borne in silence and submission, yet the frequent recurrence of some of these acts, and the uninterrupted continuance of others, when thus accompanied by neglect and want of sympathy, became in the aggregate more than she could bear, and she sunk beneath their combined weight and continued pressure, until her condition became insupportable, her health failed her, and reason and life itself would have been endangered by remaining longer in his society, on the terms on which alone he would permit her to remain with him. One of her father's letters, quoted by the relator, describes that moral tyranny,

which strikes its blows upon the mind until it totters, as equivalent to all that the body can be brought to suffer. When her father said that this had been her case, he spoke, with his habitual forbearance, as mildly as the facts would warrant. His letter contains but a small part of the history of her wrongs: it is the history of her whole married life. By the combined effect of numerous circumstances, some of them positively cruel, others merely negatively so, as the omission of what affection should have dictated, many of them individually most minute, but together, in their mass, overwhelming, she has been crushed and blighted in the earliest prime of her ripening womanhood. And now, the climax of the wrongs of which she has been the victim is attained, in an attempt made to turn these wrongs as weapons against her, to tear her child from her bosom, and thus take from her the only remaining tie by which she can be bound to life, in a world which to her must, at least, be always a world of sorrow.

The relator has attempted to introduce this part of the case, in a form to coincide with what may be termed the theory of a morbid imagination, rather than an intelligible statement of facts and circumstances. This theory, as far as it can be gathered from the contents of the suggestion, appears to be, that the marriage between the relator and the respondent was entirely one of affection, on both sides, and was desired and promoted by the parents of both. That her mother, after warmly promoting the marriage, was nevertheless, after it had taken place, unwilling that the respondent's love for herself should be absorbed in affection for the relator, and therefore, with no other assigned or assignable motive, used all the means in her power, to create in the respondent's mind a disaffection towards him and his family, with a view to implant discontent in her bosom, and thus induce her to abandon him; that in these wicked schemes, thus destitute of any rational motive, her mother was unsuccessful, so long as they were together in Europe; that the relator gave his consent, that she should pass the season of her approaching peril with her family, in her own country, with the mutual understanding that she was afterwards to return to Europe. The theory then assumes contrary alternate aspects. According to one of these aspects, it would appear, that she was, at this time, and until after her arrival at her father's house, entirely sincere in her affection for him, and in her intention to return to him; that, afterwards, her affections for him were alienated by her parents, by whom she was induced, shortly before the birth of the child, to determine to separate herself from him, and declare that she would never return to him, although she would willingly have lived with him, and would now do so, if not influenced by their evil counsels. In the other aspects in which the theory is presented, the respondent appears to be charged with having left Europe without any intention of returning to the relator, and is accused of obtaining his consent to her departure, by artifices and deceptive promises with which she never meant to comply. In the former of these opposing views of the case, she is represented as having been replete with conjugal affection and devotion to him; in the latter view of it, she would appear to have been secretly disgusted with him, and hypocritically determined to withdraw from his society, at a time when she was pretending to love him. She need

scarcely assure the court, that neither of these inconsistent charges has any foundation whatever in fact. Her conduct towards the relator has been uniformly characterized by entire openness and sincerity. She has been, throughout her unhappy marriage, under no such influence as has been thus unwarrantably imputed. To one who is aware of the misery to which the occurrences of her married life have subjected a once happy, but now broken-hearted family, the charges made against her parents would appear to be as absurd and incredible, as the theory by which it is attempted to sustain them is artificial and improbable. With regard to herself, she will find in the narrative of her case, her full justification. With regard to her parents, she can truly affirm that their only influence has been used, in vain, at first to avert, and afterwards to remedy, the evils of which the conduct of the relator himself is alone the cause. The antidote to remove the effect of these undefined charges will be the simple truth, and it is this that she intends to oppose to them. The singular eccentric course of conduct, which has been imputed to her parents, is the result of a delusion on the part of the relator, in which he has unaccountably persevered: its origin will be stated in another part of this return. The existence of this delusion she deeply deplores. It has aggravated a case of which the realities are most afflicting, by the introduction of extrinsic phantoms altogether imaginary. This part of it has been to her its most distressing incident. The declining years of her parents will be too sadly embittered by the wrongs which she has endured, and of which they know her to be the victim. Bowed down as they are with affliction, the result of sympathy for her, they are now subjected to the calumnious imputation of wantonly sacrificing the daughter, for whose sake they have already suffered so severely. The evidence on which she proposes to rely in support of her case, will consist, principally, of letters of the relator himself, and the evidence of witnesses present at the occurrence of the facts to which they will testify.

Before commencing the history of her case, she begs leave to object to the inferences and conclusions, which, on the part of the relator, it is endeavored to draw from the contents of letters from third persons, which have been incorporated with the suggestion. In one of those letters, Mr. Couvreu writes to her father an account of certain occurrences at Hauteville, the country residence of the relator's parents, which he supposes to have taken place after her father's return to America. In point of fact this gentleman, though a friend of the relator's family, was at their house, as she verily believes, once only after the day of her marriage, and during her own and her mother's stay there, except on that single occasion, of which nothing particular is recollected. His letter is therefore not the statement of a witness, but of a partisan, who had adopted implicitly the views of the relator, to whom, and whose family, his strong partiality is plainly evinced in his letter. As another illustration of the same thing, she refers to the letter of Mr. d'Hauteville, senior, to her father, dated 20th June, 1837, incorporated with the suggestion. This was a letter written, as will be seen hereafter, in a moment of pique and mortification, at what the writer then supposed to be the final rejection of his son's suit for her hand. For this reason, it was not written with his usual courtesy and good feeling. Certainly

it is not accurate in the statement of the facts of the negociation then temporarily broken off. By way of example, reference may be made to that part of the letter which states, that the relator had told the respondent's father certain things at Montmorenci. The truth is, that her father never was at Montmorenci, at any time when the relator was there. Other instances of inaccuracy in this letter will appear, by a comparison of its content's with the statement of facts contained below. The letter was the result of imperfect impressions of what he had learned from other persons, and stated according to the excitement of the feelings under which he then laboured. The whole of the correspondence of which it forms a part, was afterwards, by mutual consent, returned to the respective parties from whom it proceeded. The production, at this time, of this portion of it, in a manner apparently unnecessary for the purposes of the suggestion, has given the respondent great pain, and renders necessary, on her part, a much fuller detail of private occurences than would otherwise have been required. These two references to inaccuracies in letters, and want of knowledge of facts by the writer of them, are made by way of example only, and not as the only subjects of similar observations, on the documents of this description incorporated with the suggestion. Similar remarks might be made of their contents throughout. She therefore entirely objects to the whole of them, as ex parte and biassed statements, which do not constitute legal evidence, and are not a proper source of any impressions of the case, judicial or extra-judicial.

It appears to her difficult to introduce the painful subject of her separation, without adverting to the favourable testimony, as to her own. character and disposition, which is found in letters of the relator himself, written after her return to the United States. In these letters he admits her to be gentle and amiable, free from ill-nature, and possessed of a tender and affectionate disposition. The only fault which he imputes to her is an inconsiderate tenderness. The egotism of making these quotations cannot be avoided. It shows the necessity which has induced the relator, in his own vindication, to suggest the hypothesis that she has been acting under the influence of another person, rather than the dictates of her own judgment, and her own feelings of propriety and delicacy. This affords the true explanation of the theory on which the contents of the suggestion, in this respect, were founded. It was the only method of supplying a cause, satisfactory to his own selfesteem, for the loss of her affections, which he states that he had previously possessed in so unusual a degree. This supposed parental influence is too thin a curtain to afford any real covering for the truths which she is about to relate, and which she is quite certain will shine broadly forth through its feeble texture. When it shall have been removed, the question will be asked, what has caused the husband of a wife of such feelings and dispositions, to forfeit all claim to her confidence and her affection?

If she possessed in any degree the native qualities which have been thus attributed to her, they had not suffered in the hands of her parents for want of cultivation. Their precept and example gave her every opportunity to imbibe a nice sense of truth and of honour, and taught her a proper reserve, in the expression of her private feelings, even to

those who were, in other respects, her most intimate and confidential friends.

Her parents were residents of Boston. They were persons of retired lives. Her father's time was devoted chiefly to the pursuits of business and of literature; her mother's to the care and education of her children, and the society of a small circle of friends, who were her principal associates. When the age of their children was such, that they might be expected to profit by a visit to Europe, they went to England, Italy, and France, with a portion of their family. During their travels, their time was passed rationally, and in the different cities which they visited, their associations were with persons of congenial tastes and pursuits, and not with those of dissipated habits, or improper levity of disposition. In their serious pursuits, as in their social and public amusements, there was no casuistry which could have condemned them. These remarks are made, in consequence of observations in the relator's suggestions, or the documents which have been incorporated with them, of which it is impossible to misconceive the tendency.

In the winter of 1836-7, she made a slight casual acquaintance with the relator. It was barely commenced, when she was confined for some time to the house by a dangerous illness, which threatened her life. In the month of May, 1837, she completed the eighteenth year of her age. About that month, and shortly after her recovery from her illness, the relator procured a respectable introduction to her father's family, to whom he was represented as a gentlemen desirous of cultivating the slight acquaintance which he had formerly made with the respondent. At this time, friends of his, who she has no doubt believed in the truth of what they stated, represented him to her parents as a young man of respectable family, who was to have a million of francs on the day of his marriage, besides future expectations. His manner and conversation pleased her parents, by whom he was received with civility, as respectable persons of his age were usually received in the family, but not in any wise differently or more favourably. Since her return to the United States, the respondent has been informed of things which were not known by her at the period of which she is now speaking. She is informed, and believes, that before this renewal of their acquaintance, in the spring of 1837, the relator had made particular inquiries concerning the worldly means and circumstances of certain American ladies, of whom she was one, and that she was not the first of her country women, of reputed wealth, to whom he paid his addresses. This circumstance may, perhaps, explain a remark otherwise not perfectly intelligible, in the said letter of 20th June, 1837, from the relator's father, which describes his son as "being from the beginning well acquainted with American customs" upon such subjects.

The respondent's father had made it a rule, to which he has always scrupulously adhered, of not interfering with his children's affections in matters of marriage. This rule, however, would, in his opinion, have admitted of an exception, in the case of a foreigner; and he certainly would have discouraged, in due season, the addresses of the relator, if he had not, from the information of his friends, supposed him possessed of means adequate for the support of the respondent, in a manner not