Unfortunately for me, I had no sooner begun to proceed without difficulty, than M. de Francueil took a little journey, during which I remained intrusted with the cash, which, at that time, did not amount to more than twenty-five to thirty thousand livres.  The anxiety of mind this sum of money occasioned me, made me perceive I was very unfit to be a cash-keeper, and I have no doubt but my uneasy situation, during his absence, contributed to the illness with which I was seized after his return.

I have observed in my first part that I was born in a dying state.  A defect in the bladder caused me, during my early years, to suffer an almost continual retention of urine, and my Aunt Susan, to whose care I was intrusted, had inconceivable difficulty in preserving me.  However, she succeeded, and my robust constitution at length got the better of all my weakness, and my health became so well established that except the illness from languor, of which I have given an account, and frequent heats in the bladder which the least heating of the blood rendered troublesome, I arrived at the age of thirty almost without feeling my original infirmity.  The first time this happened was upon my arrival at Venice.  The fatigue of the voyage, and the extreme heat I had suffered, renewed the burnings, and gave me a pain in the loins, which continued until the beginning of winter.  After having seen padoana, I thought myself near the end of my career, but I suffered not the least inconvenience.  After exhausting my imagination more than my body for my Zulietta, I enjoyed better health than ever.  It was not until after the imprisonment of Diderot that the heat of blood, brought on by my journeys to Vincennes during the terrible heat of that summer, gave me a violent nephritic colic, since which I have never recovered my primitive good state of health.

At the time of which I speak, having perhaps fatigued myself too much in the filthy work of the cursed receiver-general’s office, I fell into a worse state than ever, and remained five or six weeks in my bed in the most melancholy state imaginable.  Madam Dupin sent me the celebrated Morand who, notwithstanding his address and the delicacy of his touch, made me suffer the greatest torments.  He advised me to have recourse to Daran, who, in fact gave me some relief:  but Morand, when he gave Madam Dupin an account of the state I was in, declared to her I should not be alive in six months.  This afterwards came to my ear, and made me reflect seriously on my situation and the folly of sacrificing the repose of the few days I had to live to the slavery of an employment for which I felt nothing but disgust.  Besides, how was it possible to reconcile the severe principles I had just adopted to a situation with which they had so little relation?  Should not I, the cash-keeper of a receiver-general of finances, have preached poverty and disinterestedness with a very ill grace?  These ideas fermented so powerfully