es he said,
he wished to render me. Thus was it he artfully made the world admire
his affectionate generosity, blame my ungrateful misanthropy, and
insensibly accustomed people to imagine there was nothing more between a
protector like him and a wretch like myself, than a connection founded
upon benefactions on one part and obligations on the other, without once
thinking of a friendship between equals. For my part, I have vainly
sought to discover in what I was under an obligation to this new
protector. I had lent him money, he had never lent me any; I had
attended him in his illness, he scarcely came to see me in mine; I had
given him all my friends, he never had given me any of his; I had said
everything I could in his favor, and if ever he has spoken of me it has
been less publicly and in another manner. He has never either rendered
or offered me the least service of any kind. How, therefore, was he my
Mecaenas? In what manner was I protected by him? This was
incomprehensible to me, and still remains so.

It is true, he was more or less arrogant with everybody, but I was the
only person with whom he was brutally so. I remember Saint Lambert once
ready to throw a plate at his head, upon his, in some measure, giving him
the lie at table by vulgarly saying, "That is not true." With his
naturally imperious manner he had the self-sufficiency of an upstart,
and became ridiculous by being extravagantly impertinent. An intercourse
with the great had so far intoxicated him that he gave himself airs which
none but the contemptible part of them ever assume. He never called his
lackey but by "Eh!" as if amongst the number of his servants my lord had
not known which was in waiting. When he sent him to buy anything,
he threw the money upon the ground instead of putting it into his hand.
In short, entirely forgetting he was a man, he treated him with such
shocking contempt, and so cruel a disdain in everything, that the poor
lad, a very good creature, whom Madam d'Epinay had recommended, quitted
his service without any other complaint than that of the impossibility of
enduring such treatment. This was the la Fleur of this new presuming
upstart.

As these things were nothing more than ridiculous, but quite opposite to
my character, they contributed to render him suspicious to me. I could
easily imagine that a man whose head was so much deranged could not have
a heart well placed. He piqued himself upon nothing so muc