It would be impossible to imagine in what manner I employed this short and precious interval which still remained to me, before circumstances forced me to beg my bread:—­in learning by memory passages from the poets which I had learned and forgotten a hundred times.  Every morning at ten o’clock, I went to walk in the Luxembourg with a Virgil and a Rousseau in my pocket, and there, until the hour of dinner, I passed away the time in restoring to my memory a sacred ode or a bucolic, without being discouraged by forgetting, by the study of the morning, what I had learned the evening before.  I recollected that after the defeat of Nicias at Syracuse the captive Athenians obtained a livelihood by reciting the poems of Homer.  The use I made of this erudition to ward off misery was to exercise my happy memory by learning all the poets by rote.

I had another expedient, not less solid, in the game of chess, to which I regularly dedicated, at Maugis, the evenings on which I did not go to the theatre.  I became acquainted with M. de Legal, M. Husson, Philidor, and all the great chess players of the day, without making the least improvement in the game.  However, I had no doubt but, in the end, I should become superior to them all, and this, in my own opinion, was a sufficient resource.  The same manner of reasoning served me in every folly to which I felt myself inclined.  I said to myself:  whoever excels in anything is sure to acquire a distinguished reception in society.  Let us therefore excel, no matter in what, I shall certainly be sought after; opportunities will present themselves, and my own merit will do the rest.  This childishness was not the sophism of my reason; it was that of my indolence.  Dismayed at the great and rapid efforts which would have been necessary to call forth my endeavors, I strove to flatter my idleness, and by arguments suitable to the purpose, veiled from my own eyes the shame of such a state.

I thus calmly waited for the moment when I was to be without money; and had not Father Castel, whom I sometimes went to see in my way to the coffee-house, roused me from my lethargy, I believe I should have seen myself reduced to my last farthing without the least emotion.  Father Castel was a madman, but a good man upon the whole; he was sorry to see me thus impoverish myself to no purpose.  “Since musicians and the learned,” said he, “do not sing by your scale, change the string, and apply to the women.  You will perhaps succeed better with them.  I have spoken of you to Madam de Beuzenval; go to her from me; she is a good woman who will be glad to see the countryman of her son and husband.  You will find at her house Madam de Broglie, her daughter, who is a woman of wit.  Madam Dupin is another to whom I also have mentioned you; carry her your work; she is desirous of seeing you, and will receive you well.  No thing is done in Paris without the women.  They are the curves, of which the wise are the asymptotes; they incessantly approach each other, but never touch.”