If a lady wrote to me from Paris to the Hermitage or to
Montmorency, she regretted the four sous the postage of the letter
would have cost me, and sent it by one of her servants, who came
sweating on foot, and to whom I gave a dinner and half an ecu, which
he certainly had well earned. If she proposed to me to pass with her a
week or a fortnight at her country-house, she still said to herself,
"It will be a saving to the poor man; during that time his eating will
cost him nothing." She never recollected that I was the whole time
idle, that the expenses of my family, my rent, linen and clothes
were still going on, that I paid my barber double, that it cost me
more being in her house than in my own, and although I confined my
little largesses to the house in which I customarily lived, that these
were still ruinous to me. I am certain I have paid upwards of
twenty-five ecus in the house of Madam d'Houdetot, at Eaubonne,
where I never slept more than four or five times, and upwards of a
thousand pistoles as well at Epinay as at the Chevrette, during the
five or six years I was most assiduous there. These expenses are
inevitable to a man like me, who knows not how to provide anything for
himself, and cannot support the sight of a lackey who grumbles and
serves him with a sour look. With Madam Dupin, even where I was one of
the family, and in whose house I rendered many services to the
servants, I never received theirs but for my money. In course of
time it was necessary to renounce these little liberalities, which
my situation no longer permitted me to bestow, and I felt still more
severely the inconvenience of associating with people in a situation
different from my own.
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