You ask if your friend Kitty Livingston is married? You recollect the proverb. She was ready, with as much eagerness as can be ascribed to the chaste wishes of a virgin heart, to sip the blissful cup, when alas! it slipped through her fingers—at least for a time, if not for ever. Her lover a buxom widower of five and forty braving summer heats and wintry ⟨blasts⟩ exerted himself with so much zeal in the service of his dulcinea that there is every appearance it will cost him his lungs. He is gone to the South of France, if possible, to preserve them. This method of speaking of the misfortune of your friend proceeds from pure levity not a particle of malice. I beg your pardon for it; and I hope you will be able to tell me in your next that you have not by the least propensity to a smile verified the maxim of that scurvy defamer of human nature—Rochefoucault.
--Alexander “Bitter AF” Hamilton to Angelica Church (6 December 1787)













