By this employment I should have entered a society of men of letters of the first merit; M.de Mairan, Clairaut, De Guignes and the Abbe Barthelemi, with the first two of whom I had already made an acquaintance, and that of the two others was very desirable.In fine, for this trifling employment, the duties of which I might so commodiously have discharged, there was a salary of eight hundred francs per annum.I was for a few hours undecided, and this from a fear of ****** Margency angry and displeasing M.de Malesherbes.But at length the insupportable constraint of not having it in my power to work when I thought proper, and to be commanded by time; and moreover the certainty of badly performing the functions with which I was to charge myself, prevailed over everything, and determined me to refuse a place for which I was unfit.I knew that my whole talent consisted in a certain warmth of mind with respect to the subjects of which I had to treat, and that nothing but the love of that which was great, beautiful and sublime, could animate my genius.What would the subjects of the extracts I should have had to make from books, or even the books themselves, have signified to me? My indifference about them would have frozen my pen, and stupefied my mind.People thought I could make a trade of writing, as most of the other men of letters did, instead of which I never could write but from the warmth of imagination.This certainly was not necessary for the Journal des Savants.I therefore wrote to Margency a letter of thanks in the politest terms possible, and so well explained to him my reasons, that it was not possible that either he or M.de Malesherbes could imagine there was pride or ill-humor in my refusal.They both approved of it without receiving me less politely, and the secret was so well kept that it was never known to the public.
The proposition did not come in a favorable moment.I had some time before this formed the project of quitting literature, and especially the trade of an author.I had been disgusted with men of letters by everything that had lately befallen me, and had learned from experience that it was impossible to proceed in the same track without having some connections with them.I was not much less dissatisfied with men of the world, and in general with the mixed life I had lately led, half to myself and half devoted to societies for which I was unfit.I felt more than ever, and by constant experience, that every unequal association is disadvantageous to the weaker person.Living with opulent people, and in a situation different from that I had chosen, without keeping a house as they did, I was obliged to imitate them in many things; and little expenses, which were nothing to their fortunes, were for me not less ruinous than indispensable.If another man goes to the country-house of a friend, he is served by his own servant, as well at table as in his chamber; he sends him to seek for everything he wants; having nothing directly to do with the servants of the house, not even seeing them, he gives them what he pleases, and when he thinks proper; but I, alone, and without a servant, was at the mercy of the servants of the house, of whom it was necessary to gain the good graces, that Imight not have much to suffer; and being treated as the equal of their master, I was obliged to treat them accordingly, and better than another would have done, because, in fact, I stood in greater need of their services.This, where there are but few domestics, may be complied with; but in the houses I frequented there were a great number, and the knaves so well understood their interests that they knew how to make me want the services of them all successively.The women of Paris, who have so much wit, have no just idea of this inconvenience, and in their zeal to economize my purse they ruined me.
If I supped in town, at any considerable distance from my lodgings, instead of permitting me to send for a hackney-coach, the mistress of the house ordered her horses to be put to and sent me home in her carriage; she was very glad to save me the twenty-four sous for the fiacre, but never thought of the ecus I gave to her coachman and footman.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.