Alphonse de LAMARTINE. Autograph letter, Château de Montculot, November 6, 1828, [to the Marquise de Montcalm]; 4 pages, small in-4. After leaving Paris, he “became a different man […] I am deep in the woods, completely alone with a caretaker and the Sisters of Providence whom I have settled here for the village. I rise before daybreak, writing verses worthy of you and with the enthusiasm of a 15-year-old! I then go out with a rifle slung over my shoulder and roam the woods until nightfall; I return starving, have dinner, and shut myself away by a huge fireplace with old, smoke-stained books—the kind of books one would never read in Paris, yet in which one finds the true essence of man more clearly than in our modern phrase-filled works. That’s my life—it’s delightful after three or four years of crowds and noise. […] I now see Florence only in the clouds of the past, and London in the mists of the future”…