It was not my love for Manon Baletti, but a foolish vanity and a desire to cut a figure in the luxurious city of Paris, which made me leave Holland.  But such was the disposition that Mother Nature had given me that fifteen months under The Leads had not been enough to cure this mental malady of mine.  But when I reflect upon after events of my life I am not astonished that The Leads proved ineffectual, for the numberless vicissitudes which I have gone through since have not cured me—­my disorder, indeed, being of the incurable kind.  There is no such thing as destiny.  We ourselves shape our lives, notwithstanding that saying of the Stoics, ‘Volentem ducit, nolentem trahit’.

After promising Esther to return before the end of the year, I set out with a clerk of the company who had brought the French securities, and I reached the Hague, where Boaz received me with a mingled air of wonder and admiration.  He told me that I had worked a miracle; “but,” he added, “to succeed thus you must have persuaded them that peace was on the point of being concluded.”

“By no means,” I answered; “so far from my persuading them, they are of the opposite opinion; but all the same I may tell you that peace is really imminent.”

“If you like to give me that assurance in writing,” said he, “I will make you a present of fifty thousand florins’ worth of diamonds.”

“Well,” I answered, “the French ambassador is of the same opinion as myself; but I don’t think the certainty is sufficiently great as yet for you to risk your diamonds upon it.”

Next day I finished my business with the ambassador, and the clerk returned to Amsterdam.

I went to supper at Therese’s, and found her children very well dressed.  I told her to go on to Rotterdam the next day and wait for me there with her son, as I had no wish to give scandal at the Hague.

At Rotterdam, Therese told me that she knew I had won half a million at Amsterdam, and that her fortune would be made if she could leave Holland for London.  She had instructed Sophie to tell me that my good luck was the effect of the prayers she had addressed to Heaven on my behalf.  I saw where the land lay, and I enjoyed a good laugh at the mother’s craft and the child’s piety, and gave her a hundred ducats, telling her that she should have another hundred when she wrote to me from London.  It was very evident that she thought the sum a very moderate one, but I would not give her any more.  She waited for the moment when I was getting into my carriage to beg me to give her another hundred ducats, and I said, in a low tone, that she should have a thousand if she would give me her daughter.  She thought it over for a minute, and then said that she could not part with her.

“I know very well why,” I answered; and drawing a watch from my fob I gave it to Sophie, embraced her, and went on my way.  I arrived at Paris on February 10th, and took sumptuous apartments near the Rue Montorgueil.