I pretend to the friendship, to the esteem, to the gratitude of my readers.  I claim their gratitude, if my Memoirs can give them instruction and pleasure; I claim their esteem if, rendering me justice, they find more good qualities in me than faults, and I claim their friendship as soon as they deem me worthy of it by the candour and the good faith with which I abandon myself to their judgment, without disguise and exactly as I am in reality.  They will find that I have always had such sincere love for truth, that I have often begun by telling stories for the purpose of getting truth to enter the heads of those who could not appreciate its charms.  They will not form a wrong opinion of me when they see one emptying the purse of my friends to satisfy my fancies, for those friends entertained idle schemes, and by giving them the hope of success I trusted to disappointment to cure them.  I would deceive them to make them wiser, and I did not consider myself guilty, for I applied to my own enjoyment sums of money which would have been lost in the vain pursuit of possessions denied by nature; therefore I was not actuated by any avaricious rapacity.  I might think myself guilty if I were rich now, but I have nothing.  I have squandered everything; it is my comfort and my justification.  The money was intended for extravagant follies, and by applying it to my own frolics I did not turn it into a very different, channel.

If I were deceived in my hope to please, I candidly confess I would regret it, but not sufficiently so to repent having written my Memoirs, for, after all, writing them has given me pleasure.  Oh, cruel ennui!  It must be by mistake that those who have invented the torments of hell have forgotten to ascribe thee the first place among them.  Yet I am bound to own that I entertain a great fear of hisses; it is too natural a fear for me to boast of being insensible to them, and I cannot find any solace in the idea that, when these Memoirs are published, I shall be no more.  I cannot think without a shudder of contracting any obligation towards death:  I hate death; for, happy or miserable, life is the only blessing which man possesses, and those who do not love it are unworthy of it.  If we prefer honour to life, it is because life is blighted by infamy; and if, in the alternative, man sometimes throws away his life, philosophy must remain silent.

Oh, death, cruel death!  Fatal law which nature necessarily rejects because thy very office is to destroy nature!  Cicero says that death frees us from all pains and sorrows, but this great philosopher books all the expense without taking the receipts into account.  I do not recollect if, when he wrote his ‘Tusculan Disputations’, his own Tullia was dead.  Death is a monster which turns away from the great theatre an attentive hearer before the end of the play which deeply interests him, and this is reason enough to hate it.

All my adventures are not to be found in these Memoirs; I have left out those which might have offended the persons who have played a sorry part therein.  In spite of this reserve, my readers will perhaps often think me indiscreet, and I am sorry for it.  Should I perchance become wiser before I give up the ghost, I might burn every one of these sheets, but now I have not courage enough to do it.