ich Madam
d'Epinay had not calculated, contributed to restore me to vigor. Fortune
aided my audacity. M. Mathas, fiscal procurer, heard of my
embarrasament. He sent to offer me a little house he had in his garden
of Mont Louis, at Montmorency. I accepted it with eagerness and
gratitude. The bargain was soon concluded: I immediately sent to
purchase a little furniture to add to that we already had. My effects
I had carted away with a deal of trouble, and a great expense:
notwithstanding the ice and snow my removal was completed in a couple of
days, and on the fifteenth of December I gave up the keys of the
Hermitage, after having paid the wages of the gardener, not being able to
pay my rent.

With respect to Madam le Vasseur, I told her we must part; her daughter
attempted to make me renounce my resolution, but I was inflexible.
I sent her off, to Paris in a carriage of the messenger with all the
furniture and effects she and her daughter had in common. I gave her
some money, and engaged to pay her lodging with her children, or
elsewhere to provide for her subsistence as much as it should be possible
for me to do it, and never to let her want bread as long as I should have
it myself.

Finally the day after my arrival at Mont Louis, I wrote to Madam d'Epinay
the following letter:

MONTMORENCY, 17th December 1757.

"Nothing, madam, is so natural and necessary as to leave your house the
moment you no longer approve of my remaining there. Upon you refusing
your consent to my passing the rest of the winter at the Hermitage I
quitted it on the fifteenth of December. My destiny was to enter it in
spite of myself and to leave it the same. I thank you for the residence
you prevailed upon me to make there, and I would thank you still more had
I paid for it less dear. You are right in believing me unhappy; nobody
upon earth knows better than yourself to what a degree I must be so. If
being deceived in the choice of our friends be a misfortune, it is
another not less cruel to recover from so pleasing an error."

Such is the faithful narrative of my residence at the Hermitage, and of
the reasons which obliged me to leave it. I could not break off the
recital, it was necessary to continue it with the greatest exactness;
this epoch of my life having had upon the rest of it an influence which
will extend to my latest remembrance.

THE CONFESSIONS OF JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
(I