quire more
firmness, three months would have cured me radically.

Here ends my personal connections with Madam d'Houdetot; connections of
which each has been able to judge by appearance according to the
disposition of his own heart, but in which the passion inspired me by
that amiable woman, the most lively passion, perhaps, man ever felt, will
be honorable in our own eyes by the rare and painful sacrifice we both
made to duty, honor, love, and friendship. We each had too high an
opinion of the other easily to suffer ourselves to do anything derogatory
to our dignity. We must have been unworthy of all esteem had we not set
a proper value upon one like this, and the energy of my sentiments which
have rendered us culpable, was that which prevented us from becoming so.

Thus after a long friendship for one of these women, and the strongest
affection for the other, I bade them both adieu the same day, to one
never to see her more, to the other to see her again twice, upon
occasions of which I shall hereafter speak.

After their departure, I found myself much embarrassed to fulfill so many
pressing and contradictory duties, the consequences of my imprudence; had
I been in my natural situation, after the proposition and refusal of the
journey to Geneva, I had only to remain quiet, and everything was as it
should be. But I had foolishly made of it an affair which could not
remain in the state it was, and an explanation was absolutely necessary,
unless I quitted the Hermitage, which I had just promised Madam
d'Houdetot not to do, at least for the present. Moreover she had
required me to make known the reasons for my refusal to my pretended
friends, that it might not be imputed to her. Yet I could not state the
true reason without doing an outrage to Madam d'Epinay, who certainly had
a right to my gratitude for what she had done for me. Everything well
considered, I found myself reduced to the severe but indispensable
necessity of failing in respect, either to Madam d'Upinay, Madam
d'Houdetot or to myself; and it was the last I resolved to make my
victim. This I did without hesitation, openly and fully, and with so
much generosity as to make the act worthy of expiating the faults which
had reduced me to such an extremity. This sacrifice, taken advantage of
by my enemies, and which they, perhaps, did not expect, has ruined my
reputation, and by their assiduity, deprived me of the esteem of the
public; but it has restore