ortune, then I
should either have been virtuous, or I should have pretended
virtue, like other persons. As it was, they wanted me to be
ridiculous, and I made myself so; as for being vicious, nature
alone had taken all the trouble that was needed in that. When I use
the term vicious, it is for the sake of talking your language; for,
if we came to explanations, it might happen that you called vice
what I call virtue, and virtue what I call vice.

Then we have the authors of the Opera Comique, their actors and
their actresses, and oftener still their managers, all people of
resource and superior merit. And I forget the whole clique of
scribblers in the gazettes, the _Avant Coureur_, the _Petites
Affiches_, the _Annee litteraire_, the _Observateur litteraire_.

_I._--The _Annee litteraire_, the _Observateur litteraire_! But
they detest one another.

_He._--Quite true, but all beggars are reconciled at the porringer.
That cursed _Observateur litteraire_, I wish the devil had had both
him and his sheet! It was that dog of a miserly priest who caused
my disaster. He appeared on our horizon for the first time; he
arrived at the hour that drives us all out of our dens, the hour
for dinner. When it is bad weather, lucky the man among us who has
a shilling in his pocket to pay for a hackney-coach! He is free to
laugh at a comrade for coming besplashed up to his eyes and wet to
the skin, though at night he goes to his own home in just the same
plight. There was one of them some months ago who had a violent
brawl with the Savoyard at the door. They had a running account;
the creditor insisted on being paid, and the debtor was not in
funds, and yet he could not go upstairs without passing through the
hands of the other.

Dinner is served; they do the honours of the table to the
abbe--they place him at the upper end. I come in and see this.
"What, abbe, you preside? That is all very well for to-day, but
to-morrow you will come down, if you please, by one plate; the day
after by another plate, and so on from plate to plate, now to right
and now to left, until from the place that I occupied one time
before you, Freron once after me, Dorat once after Freron, Palissot
once after Dorat, you become stationary beside me, poor rascal as
you are--_che siedo