acre, but never thought of the half-crown I gave to
her coachman and footman. If a lady wrote to me from Paris to the Hermit
age or to Montmorency, she regretted the four sous (two pence) the
postage of the letter would have cost me, and sent it by one of her
servants, who came sweating on foot, and to whom I gave a dinner and half
a crown, which he certainly had well earned. If she proposed to me to
pass with her a week or a fortnight at her country-house, she still said
to herself, "It will be a saving to the poor man; during that time his
eating will cost him nothing." She never recollected that I was the
whole time idle, that the expenses of my family, my rent, linen and
clothes were still going on, that I paid my barber double that it cost me
more being in her house than in my own, and although I confined my
little largesses to the house in which I customarily lived, that these
were still ruinous to me. I am certain I have paid upwards of
twenty-five crowns in the house of Madam d'Houdetot, at Raubonne, where
I never slept more than four or five times, and upwards of a thousand
livres (forty pounds) as well at Epinay as at the Chevrette, during the
five or six years I was most assiduous there. These expenses are
inevitable to a man like me, who knows not how to provide anything for
himself, and cannot support the sight of a lackey who grumbles and
serves him with a sour look. With Madam Dupin, even where I was one of
the family, and in whose house I rendered many services to the servants,
I never received theirs but for my money. In course of time it was
necessary to renounce these little liberalities, which my situation no
longer permitted me to bestow, and I felt still more severely the
inconvenience of associating with people in a situation different from
my own.

Had this manner of life been to my taste, I should have been consoled for
a heavy expense, which I dedicated to my pleasures; but to ruin myself at
the same time that I fatigued my mind, was insupportable, and I had so
felt the weight of this, that, profiting by the interval of liberty I
then had, I was determined to perpetuate it, and entirely to renounce
great companies, the composition of books, and all literary concerns, and
for the remainder of my days to confine myself to the narrow and peaceful
sphere in which I felt I was born to move.

The produce of this letter to D'Alembert, and of the New Elosia, had a
little improved the state of