The year following (1750), not thinking more of my discourse; I learned it had gained the premium at Dijon.  This news awakened all the ideas which had dictated it to me, gave them new animation, and completed the fermentation of my heart of that first leaven of heroism and virtue which my father, my country, and Plutarch had inspired in my infancy.  Nothing now appeared great in my eyes but to be free and virtuous, superior to fortune and opinion, and independent of all exterior circumstances; although a false shame, and the fear of disapprobation at first prevented me from conducting myself according to these principles, and from suddenly quarreling with the maxims of the age in which I lived, I from that moment took a decided resolution to do it.—­[And of this I purposely delayed the execution, that irritated by contradiction f it might be rendered triumphant.]

While I was philosophizing upon the duties of man, an event happened which made me better reflect upon my own.  Theresa became pregnant for the third time.  Too sincere with myself, too haughty in my mind to contradict my principles by my actions, I began to examine the destination of my children, and my connections with the mother, according to the laws of nature, justice, and reason, and those of that religion, pure, holy, and eternal, like its author, which men have polluted while they pretended to purify it, and which by their formularies they have reduced to a religion of words, since the difficulty of prescribing impossibilities is but trifling to those by whom they are not practised.

If I deceived myself in my conclusions, nothing can be more astonishing than the security with which I depended upon them.  Were I one of those men unfortunately born deaf to the voice of nature, in whom no sentiment of justice or humanity ever took the least root, this obduracy would be natural.  But that warmth of heart, strong sensibility, and facility of forming attachments; the force with which they subdue me; my cruel sufferings when obliged to break them; the innate benevolence I cherished towards my fellow-creatures; the ardent love I bear to great virtues, to truth and justice, the horror in which I hold evil of every kind; the impossibility of hating, of injuring or wishing to injure anyone; the soft and lively emotion I feel at the sight of whatever is virtuous, generous and amiable; can these meet in the same mind with the depravity which without scruple treads under foot the most pleasing of all our duties?  No, I feel, and openly declare this to be impossible.  Never in his whole life could J. J. be a man without sentiment or an unnatural father.  I may have been deceived, but it is impossible I should have lost the least of my feelings.  Were I to give my reasons, I should say too much; since they have seduced me, they would seduce many others.  I will not therefore expose those young persons by whom I may be read to the same danger.  I will satisfy myself by observing that my error was