BOOK III.

Leaving the service of Madam de Vercellis nearly as I had entered it, I returned to my former hostess, and remained there five or six weeks; during which time health, youth, and laziness, frequently rendered my temperament importunate.  I was restless, absent, and thoughtful:  I wept and sighed for a happiness I had no idea of, though at the same time highly sensible of some deficiency.  This situation is indescribable, few men can even form any conception of it, because, in general, they have prevented that plenitude of life, at once tormenting and delicious.  My thoughts were incessantly occupied with girls and women, but in a manner peculiar to myself:  these ideas kept my senses in a perpetual and disagreeable activity, though, fortunately, they did not point out the means of deliverance.  I would have given my life to have met with a Miss Goton, but the time was past in which the play of infancy predominated; increase of years had introduced shame, the inseparable companion of a conscious deviation from rectitude, which so confirmed my natural timidity as to render it invincible; and never, either at that time or since, could I prevail on myself to offer a proposition favorable to my wishes (unless in a manner constrained to it by previous advances) even with those whose scruples I had no cause to dread.

My stay at Madam de Vercellis’s had procured me some acquaintance, which I thought might be serviceable to me, and therefore wished to retain.  Among others, I sometimes visited a Savoyard abbe, M. Gaime, who was tutor to the Count of Melarede’s children.  He was young, and not much known, but possessed an excellent cultivated understanding, with great probity, and was, altogether, one of the best men I ever knew.  He was incapable of doing me the service I then stood most in need of, not having sufficient interest to procure me a situation, but from him I reaped advantages far more precious, which have been useful to me through life, lessons of pure morality, and maxims of sound judgment.

In the successive order of my inclinations and ideas, I had ever been too high or too low.  Achilles or Thersites; sometimes a hero, at others a villain.  M. Gaime took pains to make me properly acquainted with myself, without sparing or giving me too much discouragement.  He spoke in advantageous terms of my disposition and talents, adding, that he foresaw obstacles which would prevent my profiting by them; thus, according to him, they were to serve less as steps by which I should mount to fortune, than as resources which might enable me to exist without one.  He gave me a true picture of human life, of which, hitherto, I had formed but a very erroneous idea, teaching me, that a man of understanding, though destined to experience adverse fortune, might, by skilful management, arrive at happiness; that there was no true felicity without virtue, which was practicable in every situation.