de Chetardie, that from
Petersbourg; and sometimes to each of those the news they had
respectively sent to him, and which I was employed to dress up in
terms different from those in which it was conveyed to us. As he
read nothing of what I laid before him, except the despatches for
the court, and signed those to other ambassadors without reading them,
this left me more at liberty to give what turn I thought proper to the
latter, and in these, therefore, I made the articles of information
cross each other. But it was impossible for me to do the same by
despatches of importance; and I thought myself happy when M. de
Montaigu did not take it into his head to cram into them an
impromptu of a few lines after his manner. This obliged me to
return, and hastily transcribe the whole despatch decorated with his
new nonsense, and honor it with the cipher, without which he would
have refused his signature. I was frequently almost tempted, for the
sake of his reputation, to cipher something different from what he had
written, but feeling that nothing could authorize such a deception,
I left him to answer for his own folly, satisfying myself with
having spoken to him with freedom, and discharged at my own peril
the duties of my station. This is what I always did with an
uprightness, a zeal and courage, which merited on his part a very
different recompense from that which in the end I received from him.
It was time I should once be what Heaven, which had endowed me with
a happy disposition, what the education that had been given me by
the best of women, and that I had given myself, had prepared me for,
and I became so.
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