ridiculous manner of wearing long swords, to which they appeared to have been fastened.  The prodigious mystery in all their proceedings gave them the appearance of the heads of a party, and I never had the least doubt of their being the authors of the ‘Gazette Ecclesiastique’.  The one, tall, smooth-tongued, and sharping, was named Ferrand; the other, short, squat, a sneerer, and punctilious, was a M. Minard.  They called each other cousin.  They lodged at Paris with D’Alembert, in the house of his nurse named Madam Rousseau, and had taken at Montmorency a little apartment to pass the summers there.  They did everything for themselves, and had neither a servant nor runner; each had his turn weekly to purchase provisions, do the business of the kitchen, and sweep the house.  They managed tolerably well, and we sometimes ate with each other.  I know not for what reason they gave themselves any concern about me:  for my part, my only motive for beginning an acquaintance with them was their playing at chess, and to make a poor little party I suffered four hours’ fatigue.  As they thrust themselves into all companies, and wished to intermeddle in everything, Theresa called them the gossips, and by this name they were long known at Montmorency.

Such, with my host M. Mathas, who was a good man, were my principal country acquaintance.  I still had a sufficient number at Paris to live there agreeably whenever I chose it, out of the sphere of men of letters, amongst whom Duclos, was the only friend I reckoned:  for De Levre was still too young, and although, after having been a witness to the manoeuvres of the philosophical tribe against me, he had withdrawn from it, at least I thought so, I could not yet forget the facility with which he made himself the mouthpiece of all the people of that description.

In the first place I had my old and respectable friend Roguin.  This was a good old-fashioned friend for whom I was not indebted to my writings but to myself, and whom for that reason I have always preserved.  I had the good Lenieps, my countryman, and his daughter, then alive, Madam Lambert.  I had a young Genevese, named Coindet, a good creature, careful, officious, zealous, who came to see me soon after I had gone to reside at the Hermitage, and, without any other introducer than himself, had made his way into my good graces.  He had a taste for drawing, and was acquainted with artists.  He was of service to me relative to the engravings of the New Eloisa; he undertook the direction of the drawings and the plates, and acquitted himself well of the commission.