She held perpetual whisperings with my friends;
everything in my little family was mysterious and a secret to me; and,
that I might not incessantly expose myself to noisy quarreling, I no
longer dared to take notice of what passed in it. A firmness of
which I was not capable, would have been necessary to withdraw me from
this domestic strife. I knew how to complain, but not how to act: they
suffered me to say what I pleased, and continued to act as they
thought proper.
This constant teasing, and the daily importunities to which I was
subject, rendered the house, and my residence at Paris, disagreeable
to me. When my indisposition permitted me to go out, and I did not
suffer myself to be led by my acquaintance first to one place and then
to another, I took a walk, alone, and reflected on my grand system,
something of which I committed to paper, bound up between two
covers, which, with a pencil, I always had in my pocket. In this
manner, the unforeseen disagreeableness of a situation I had chosen
entirely led me back to literature, to which unsuspectedly I had
recourse as a means of relieving my mind, and thus, in the first works
I wrote, I introduced the peevishness and ill-humor which were the
cause of my undertaking them. There was another circumstance which
contributed not a little to this: thrown into the world in despite
of myself, without having the manners of it, or being in a situation
to adopt and conform myself to them, I took it into my head to adopt
others of my own, to enable me to dispense with those of society.
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