thing
in that house." All this I took for granted.

The same Gauffecourt rendered me much about this time, a service of which
I stood in the greatest need. I had just lost my virtuous father, who
was about sixty years of age. I felt this loss less severely than I
should have done at any other time, when the embarrassments of my
situation had less engaged my attention. During his life-time I had
never claimed what remained of the property of my mother, and of which he
received the little interest. His death removed all my scruples upon
this subject. But the want of a legal proof of the death of my brother
created a difficulty which Gauffecourt undertook to remove, and this he
effected by means of the good offices of the advocate De Lolme. As I
stood in need of the little resource, and the event being doubtful, I
waited for a definitive account with the greatest anxiety.

One evening on entering my apartment I found a letter, which I knew to
contain the information I wanted, and I took it up with an impatient
trembling, of which I was inwardly ashamed. What? said I to myself,
with disdain, shall Jean Jacques thus suffer himself to be subdued by
interest and curiosity? I immediately laid the letter again upon the
chimney-piece. I undressed myself, went to bed with great composure,
slept better than ordinary, and rose in the morning at a late hour,
without thinking more of my letter. As I dressed myself, it caught my
eye; I broke the seal very leisurely, and found under the envelope a bill
of exchange. I felt a variety of pleasing sensations at the same time:
but I can assert, upon my honor, that the most lively of them all was
that proceeding from having known how to be master of myself.

I could mention twenty such circumstances in my life, but I am too much
pressed for time to say everything. I sent a small part of this money to
my poor mamma; regretting, with my eyes suffused with tears, the happy
time when I should have laid it all at her feet. All her letters
contained evident marks of her distress. She sent me piles of recipes,
and numerous secrets, with which she pretended I might make my fortune
and her own. The idea of her wretchedness already affected her heart and
contracted her mind. The little I sent her fell a prey to the knaves by
whom she was surrounded; she received not the least advantage from
anything. The idea of dividing what was necessary to my own subsistence
with these wretches