rvices. This, where there are
but few domestics, may be complied with; but in the houses I frequented
there were a great number, and the knaves so well understood their
interests that they knew how to make me want the services of them all
successively. The women of Paris, who have so much wit, have no just
idea of this inconvenience, and in their zeal to economize my purse they
ruined me. If I supped in town, at any considerable distance from my
lodgings, instead of permitting me to send for a hackney coach, the
mistress of the house ordered her horses to be put to and sent me home in
her carriage. She was very glad to save me the twenty-four sous
(shilling) for the fiacre, 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 situati