As soon as the bad season began to confine me to the house, I wished
to return to my indolent amusements, but this I found impossible. I
had everywhere two charming female friends before my eyes, their
friend, everything by which they were surrounded, the country they
inhabited, and the objects created or embellished for them by my
imagination. I was no longer myself for a moment, my delirium never
left me. After many useless efforts to banish all fictions from my
mind, they at length seduced me, and my future endeavors were confined
to giving them order and coherence, for the purpose of converting them
into a species of novel.
What embarrassed me most was, that I had contradicted myself so
openly and fully. After the severe principles I had just so publicly
asserted, after the austere maxims I had so loudly preached, and my
violent invectives against books, which breathed nothing but
effeminacy and love, could anything be less expected or more
extraordinary, than to see me, with my own hand, write my name in
the list of authors of those books, I had so severely censured? I felt
this incoherence in all its extent. I reproached myself with it, I
blushed at it and was vexed; but all this could not bring me back to
reason. Completely overcome, I was at all risks obliged to submit, and
to resolve to brave the What will the world say of it? Except only
deliberating afterwards whether or not I should show my work, for I
did not yet suppose should ever determine to publish it.
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