I, if I may so speak, enjoy it a second time at pleasure.  It is to this happy disposition I am indebted for an exemption from that ill humor which ferments in a vindictive mind, by the continual remembrance of injuries received, and torments it with all the evil it wishes to do its enemy.  Naturally choleric, I have felt all the force of anger, which in the first moments has sometimes been carried to fury, but a desire of vengeance never took root within me.  I think too little of the offence to give myself much trouble about the offender.  I think of the injury I have received from him on account of that he may do me a second time, but were I certain he would never do me another the first would be instantly forgotten.  Pardon of offences is continually preached to us.  I knew not whether or not my heart would be capable of overcoming its hatred, for it never yet felt that passion, and I give myself too little concern about my enemies to have the merit of pardoning them.  I will not say to what a degree, in order to torment me, they torment themselves.  I am at their mercy, they have unbounded power, and make of it what use they please.  There is but one thing in which I set them at defiance:  which is in tormenting themselves about me, to force me to give myself the least trouble about them.

The day after my departure I had so perfectly forgotten what had passed, the parliament, Madam de Pompadour, M. de Choiseul, Grimm, and D’Alembert, with their conspiracies, that had not it been for the necessary precautions during the journey I should have thought no more of them.  The remembrance of one thing which supplied the place of all these was what I had read the evening before my departure.  I recollect, also, the pastorals of Gessner, which his translator Hubert had sent me a little time before.  These two ideas occurred to me so strongly, and were connected in such a manner in my mind, that I was determined to endeavor to unite them by treating after the manner of Gessner, the subject of the Levite of Ephraim.  His pastoral and simple style appeared to me but little fitted to so horrid a subject, and it was not to be presumed the situation I was then in would furnish me with such ideas as would enliven it.  However, I attempted the thing, solely to amuse myself in my cabriolet, and without the least hope of success.  I had no sooner begun than I was astonished at the liveliness of my ideas, and the facility with which I expressed them.  In three days I composed the first three cantos of the little poem I finished at Motiers, and I am certain of not having done anything in my life in which there is a more interesting mildness of manners, a greater brilliancy of coloring, more simple delineations, greater exactness of proportion, or more antique simplicity in general, notwithstanding the horror of the subject which in itself is abominable, so that besides every other merit I had still that of a difficulty conquered.  If the Levite of