The security, voluptuousness, and confidence with
which I gave myself up to this indolent and solitary life, which I had
not the means of continuing for three months, is one of the
singularities of my life, and the oddities of my disposition. The
extreme desire I had the public should think of me was precisely
what discouraged me from showing myself; and the necessity of paying
visits rendered them to such a degree insupportable, that I ceased
visiting the academicians and other men of letters, with whom I had
cultivated an acquaintance. Marivaux, the Abbe Mably, and
Fontenelle, were almost the only persons whom I sometimes went to see.
To the first I showed my comedy of Narcissus. He was pleased with
it, and had the goodness to make in it some improvements. Diderot,
younger than these, was much about my own age. He was fond of music,
and knew it theoretically; we conversed together, and he
communicated to me some of his literary projects. This soon formed
betwixt us a more intimate connection which lasted fifteen years,
and which probably would still exist were not I, unfortunately, and by
his own fault, of the same profession with himself.
It would be impossible to imagine in what manner I employed this
short and precious interval which still remained to me, before
circumstances forced me to beg my bread:- in learning by memory
passages from the poets which I had learned and forgotten a hundred
times. Every morning, at ten o'clock, I went to walk in the Luxembourg
with a Virgil and a Rousseau in my pocket, and there, until the hour
of dinner, I passed away the time in restoring to my memory a sacred
ode or a bucolic, without being discouraged by forgetting, by the
study of the morning, what I had learned the evening before.
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