almost without taking pen from paper, and which I neither copied, corrected, nor even read, are perhaps the only things I ever wrote with facility, which, in the midst of my sufferings, was, I think, astonishing.  I sighed, as I felt myself declining, at the thought of leaving in the midst of honest men an opinion of me so far from truth; and by the sketch hastily given in my four letters, I endeavored, in some measure, to substitute them to the memoirs I had proposed to write.  They are expressive of my grief to M. de Malesherbes, who showed them in Paris, and are, besides, a kind of summary of what I here give in detail, and, on this account, merit preservation.  The copy I begged of them some years afterwards will be found amongst my papers.

The only thing which continued to give me pain, in the idea of my approaching dissolution, was my not having a man of letters for a friend, to whom I could confide my papers, that after my death he might take a proper choice of such as were worthy of publication.

After my journey to Geneva, I conceived a friendship for Moulton; this young man pleased me, and I could have wished him to receive my last breath.  I expressed to him this desire, and am of opinion he would readily have complied with it, had not his affairs prevented him from so doing.  Deprived of this consolation, I still wished to give him a mark of my confidence by sending him the ’Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’ before it was published.  He was pleased with the work, but did not in his answer seem so fully to expect from it the effect of which I had but little doubt.  He wished to receive from me some fragment which I had not given to anybody else.  I sent him the funeral oration of the late Duke of Orleans; this I had written for the Abbe Darty, who had not pronounced it, because, contrary to his expectation, another person was appointed to perform that ceremony.

The printing of Emilius, after having been again taken in hand, was continued and completed without much difficulty; and I remarked this singularity, that after the curtailings so much insisted upon in the first two volumes, the last two were passed over without an objection, and their contents did not delay the publication for a moment.  I had, however, some uneasiness which I must not pass over in silence.  After having been afraid of the Jesuits, I begun to fear the Jansenists and philosophers.  An enemy to party, faction and cabal, I never heard the least good of parties concerned in them.  The gossips had quitted their old abode and taken up their residence by the side of me, so that in their chamber, everything said in mine, and upon the terrace, was distinctly heard; and from their garden it would have been easy to scale the low wall by which it was separated from my alcove.  This was become my study; my table was covered with proofsheets of Emilius and the Social Contract and stitching these sheets as they were sent to me, I had all my volumes a long time