asure, do not order my affairs so ill. If the way be foul on my right
hand, I turn on my left; if I find myself unfit to ride, I stay where I
am; and, so doing, in earnest I see nothing that is not as pleasant and
commodious as my own house. 'Tis true that I always find superfluity
superfluous, and observe a kind of trouble even in abundance itself.
Have I left anything behind me unseen, I go back to see it; 'tis still on
my way; I trace no certain line, either straight or crooked.--[Rousseau
has translated this passage in his Emile, book v.]--Do I not find in the
place to which I go what was reported to me--as it often falls out that
the judgments of others do not jump with mine, and that I have found
their reports for the most part false--I never complain of losing my
labour: I have, at least, informed myself that what was told me was not
true.

I have a constitution of body as free, and a palate as indifferent, as
any man living: the diversity of manners of several nations only affects
me in the pleasure of variety: every usage has its reason. Let the plate
and dishes be pewter, wood, or earth; my meat be boiled or roasted; let
them give me butter or oil, of nuts or olives, hot or cold, 'tis all one
to me; and so indifferent, that growing old, I accuse this generous
faculty, and would wish that delicacy and choice should correct the
indiscretion of my appetite, and sometimes soothe my stomach. When I
have been abroad out of France and that people, out of courtesy, have
asked me if I would be served after the French manner, I laughed at the
question, and always frequented tables the most filled with foreigners.
I am ashamed to see our countrymen besotted with this foolish humour of
quarrelling with forms contrary to their own; they seem to be out of
their element when out of their own village: wherever they go, they keep
to their own fashions and abominate those of strangers. Do they meet
with a compatriot in Hungary? O the happy chance! They are henceforward
inseparable; they cling together, and their whole discourse is to condemn
the barbarous manners they see about them. Why barbarous, because they
are not French? And those have made the best use of their travels who
have observed most to speak against. Most of them go for no other end
but to come back again; they proceed in their travel with vast gravity
and circumspection, with a silent and incommunicable prudence, preserving
themselves from the contagio