My vocation thus determined, I was bound apprentice; not, however, to a watchmaker, but to an engraver, and I had been so completely humiliated by the contempt of the register, that I submitted without a murmur.  My master, whose name was M. Ducommon, was a young man of a very violent and boorish character, who contrived in a short time to tarnish all the amiable qualities of my childhood, to stupefy a disposition naturally sprightly, and reduce my feelings, as well as my condition, to an absolute state of servitude.  I forgot my Latin, history, and antiquities; I could hardly recollect whether such people as Romans ever existed.  When I visited my father, he no longer beheld his idol, nor could the ladies recognize the gallant Jean Jacques; nay, I was so well convinced that Mr. and Miss Lambercier would scarce receive me as their pupil, that I endeavored to avoid their company, and from that time have never seen them.  The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them.  I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar so quickly become a Laradon.

The art itself did not displease me.  I had a lively taste for drawing.  There was nothing displeasing in the exercise of the graver; and as it required no very extraordinary abilities to attain perfection as a watchcase engraver, I hoped to arrive at it.  Perhaps I should have accomplished my design, if unreasonable restraint, added to the brutality of my master, had not rendered my business disgusting.  I wasted his time, and employed myself in engraving medals, which served me and my companions as a kind of insignia for a new invented order of chivalry, and though this differed very little from my usual employ, I considered it as a relaxation.  Unfortunately, my master caught me at this contraband labor, and a severe beating was the consequence.  He reproached me at the same time with attempting to make counterfeit money because our medals bore the arms of the Republic, though, I can truly aver, I had no conception of false money, and very little of the true, knowing better how to make a Roman As than one of our threepenny pieces.

My master’s tyranny rendered insupportable that labor I should otherwise have loved, and drove me to vices I naturally despised, such as falsehood, idleness, and theft.  Nothing ever gave me a clearer demonstration of the difference between filial dependence and abject slavery, than the remembrance of the change produced in me at that period.  Hitherto I had enjoyed a reasonable liberty; this I had suddenly lost.  I was enterprising at my father’s, free at Mr. Lambercier’s, discreet at my uncle’s; but, with my master, I became fearful, and from that moment my mind was vitiated.  Accustomed to live on terms of perfect equality, to be witness of no