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 connections than those of simple benevolence.  These, without the least constraint upon liberty, constitute the pleasure of society, of which equality is the basis.  I had of them as many as were necessary to enable me to taste of the charm of liberty without being subject to the dependence of it; and as soon as I had made an experiment of this manner of life, I felt it was the most proper to my age, to end my days in peace, far removed from the agitations, quarrels and cavillings in which I had just been half submerged.

During my residence at the Hermitage, and after my settlement at Montmorency, I had made in the neighborhood some agreeable acquaintance, and which did not subject me to any inconvenience.  The principal of these was young Loiseau de Mauleon, who, then beginning to plead at the bar, did not yet know what rank he would one day hold there.  I for my part was not in the least doubt about the matter.  I soon pointed out to him the illustrious career in the midst of which he is now seen, and predicted that, if he laid down to himself rigid rules for the choice of causes, and never became the defender of anything but virtue and justice, his genius, elevated by this sublime