I had not favored even that intoxicating
voluptuousness with which my mind was richly stored, and which, for
want of an object, was always compressed, and never exhaled but by
signs.
How was it possible that, with a mind naturally expansive, I, with
whom to live was to love, should not hitherto have found a friend
entirely devoted to me; a real friend: I who felt myself so capable of
being such a friend to another? How can it be accounted for that
with such warm affections, such combustible senses, and a heart wholly
made up of love, I had not once, at least, felt its flame for a
determinate object? Tormented by the want of loving, without ever
having been able to satisfy it, I perceived myself approaching the eve
of old age, and hastening on to death without having lived.
These melancholy but affecting recollections led me to others which,
although accompanied with regret, were not wholly unsatisfactory. I
thought something I had not yet received was still due to me from
destiny.
To what end was I born with exquisite faculties? To suffer them to
remain unemployed? The sentiment of conscious merit, which made me
consider myself as suffering injustice, was some kind of reparation,
and caused me to shed tears which with pleasure I suffered to flow.
These were my meditations during the finest season of the year, in
the month of June, in cool shades, to the songs of the nightingale,
and the warbling of brooks. Everything concurred in plunging me into
that too seducing state of indolence for which I was born, but from
which my austere manner, proceeding from a long effervescence,
should forever have delivered me.
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