Yet the same work, notwithstanding all the mildness it breathed, made me by a mistake of my own and my usual ill-luck, another enemy amongst men of letters.  I had become acquainted with Marmontel at the house of M. de la Popliniere, and his acquaintance had been continued at that of the baron.  Marmontel at that time wrote the ‘Mercure de France’.  As I had too much pride to send my works to the authors of periodical publications, and wishing to send him this without his imagining it was in consequence of that title, or being desirous he should speak of it in the Mercure, I wrote upon the book that it was not for the author of the Mercure, but for M. Marmontel.  I thought I paid him a fine compliment; he mistook it for a cruel offence, and became my irreconcilable enemy.  He wrote against the letter with politeness, it is true, but with a bitterness easily perceptible, and since that time has never lost an opportunity of injuring me in society, and of indirectly ill-treating me in his works.  Such difficulty is there in managing the irritable self-love of men of letters, and so careful ought every person to be not to leave anything equivocal in the compliments they pay them.

Having nothing more to disturb me, I took advantage of my leisure and independence to continue my literary pursuits with more coherence.  I this winter finished my Eloisa, and sent it to Rey, who had it printed the year following.  I was, however, interrupted in my projects by a circumstance sufficiently disagreeable.  I heard new preparations were making at the opera-house to give the ‘Devin du Village’.  Enraged at seeing these people arrogantly dispose of my property, I again took up the memoir I had sent to M. D’Argenson, to which no answer had been returned, and having made some trifling alterations in it, I sent the manuscript by M. Sellon, resident from Geneva, and a letter with which he was pleased to charge himself, to the Comte de St. Florentin, who had succeeded M. D’Argenson in the opera department.  Duclos, to whom I communicated what I had done, mentioned it to the ‘petits violons’, who offered to restore me, not my opera, but my freedom of the theatre, which I was no longer in a situation to enjoy.  Perceiving I had not from any quarter the least justice to expect, I gave up the affair; and the directors of the opera, without either answering or listening to my reasons, have continued to dispose as of their own property, and to turn to their profit, the Devin du Village, which incontestably belong to nobody but myself.

Since I had shaken off the yoke of my tyrants, I led a life sufficiently agreeable and peaceful; deprived of the charm of too strong attachments I was delivered from the weight of their chains.  Disgusted with the friends who pretended to be my protectors, and wished absolutely to dispose of me at will, and in spite of myself, to subject me to their pretended good services, I resolved in future to have no other