My Letter to D'Alembert had great success.All my works had been very well received, but this was more favorable to me.It taught the public to guard against the insinuations of the Coterie Holbachique.
When I went to the Hermitage, this Coterie predicted with its usual sufficiency, that I should not remain there three months.When I had stayed there twenty months, and was obliged to leave it, I still fixed my residence in the country.The Coterie insisted this was from a motive of pure obstinacy, and that I was weary even to death of my retirement; but that, eaten up with pride, I chose rather to become a victim to my stubbornness than to recover from it and return to Paris.The Letter to D'Alembert breathed a gentleness of mind which every one perceived not to be affected.Had I been dissatisfied with my retreat, my style and manner would have borne evident marks of my ill-humor.This reigned in all the works I had written at Paris; but in the first I wrote in the country not the least appearance of it was to be found.To persons who knew how to distinguish, this remark was decisive.They perceived I was returned to my element.
Yet the same work, notwithstanding all the mildness it breathed, made me by a mistake of my own and my usual ill-luck, another enemy amongst men of letters.I had become acquainted with Marmontel at the house of M.de la Popliniere, and this acquaintance had been continued at that of the baron.Marmontel at that time wrote the Mercure de France.As I had too much pride to send my works to the authors of periodical publications, and wishing to send him this without his imagining it was in consequence of that title, or being desirous he should speak of it in the Mercure, I wrote upon the book that it was not for the author of the Mercure, but for M.Marmontel.Ithought I paid him a fine compliment; he mistook it for a cruel offense, and became my irreconcilable enemy.He wrote against the letter with politeness, it is true, but with a bitterness easily perceptible, and since that time has never lost an opportunity of injuring me in society, and of indirectly ill-treating me in his works.Such difficulty is there in managing the irritable self-love of men of letters, and so careful ought every person to be not to leave anything equivocal in the compliments they pay them.
Having nothing more to disturb me, I took advantage of my leisure and independence to continue my literary pursuits with more coherence.
I this winter finished my Eloisa, and sent it to Rey, who had it printed the year following.I was, however, interrupted in my projects by a circumstance sufficiently disagreeable.I heard new preparations were making at the opera-house to give the Devin du Village.Enraged at seeing these people arrogantly dispose of my property, I again took up the memoir I had sent to M.D'Argenson, to which no answer had been returned, and having made some trifling alterations in it, I sent the manuscript by M.Sellon, resident from Geneva, and a letter with which he was pleased to charge himself, to the Comte de St.Florentin, who had succeeded M.D'Argenson in the opera department.Duclos, to whom I communicated what I had done, mentioned it to the petits violons, who offered to restore me, not my opera, but my freedom of the theater, which I was no longer in a situation to enjoy.Perceiving I had not from any quarter the least justice to expect, I gave up the affair; and the directors of the opera, without either answering or listening to my reasons, have continued to dispose as of their own property, and to turn to their profit, the Devin du Village, which incontestably belongs to nobody but myself.** It now belongs to them by virtue of an agreement made to that effect.
Since I had shaken off the yoke of my tyrants, I led a life sufficiently agreeable and peaceful; deprived of the charm of too strong attachments I was delivered from the weight of their chains.
Disgusted with the friends who pretended to be my protectors, and wished absolutely to dispose of me at will, and in spite of myself, to subject me to their pretended good services, I resolved in future to have no other connections than those of simple benevolence.These, without the least constraint upon liberty, constitute the pleasure of society, of which equality is the basis.I had of them as many as were necessary to enable me to taste of the charms of liberty without being subject to the dependence of it; and as soon as I had made an experiment of this manner of life, I felt it was the most proper to my age, to end my days in peace, far removed from the agitations, quarrels and cavillings, in which I had just been half submerged.
During my residence at the Hermitage, and after my settlement at Montmorency, I had made in the neighborhood some agreeable acquaintance, and which did not subject me to any inconvenience.The principal of these was young Loyseau de Mauleon, who, then beginning to plead at the bar, did not yet know what rank he would one day hold there.I for my part was not in the least doubt about the matter.
I soon pointed out to him the illustrious career in the midst of which he is now seen, and predicted that, if he laid down to himself rigid rules for the choice of causes, and never became the defender of anything but virtue and justice, his genius, elevated by this sublime sentiment, would be equal to that of the greatest orators.
He followed my advice, and now feels the good effects of it.His defense of M.de Portes is worthy of Demosthenes.He came every year within a quarter of a league of the Hermitage to pass the vacation at St.Brice, in the fief of Mauleon, belonging to his mother, and where the great Bossuet had formerly lodged.This is a fief, of which a like succession of proprietors would render nobility difficult to support.
