confidence with which I gave myself up to this indolent and solitary
life, which I had not the means of continuing for three months, is one of
the singularities of my life, and the oddities of my disposition. The
extreme desire I had, the public should think of me was precisely what
discouraged me from showing myself; and the necessity of paying visits
rendered them to such a degree insupportable, that I ceased visiting the
academicians and other men of letters, with whom I had cultivated an
acquaintance. Marivaux, the Abbe Malby, and Fontenelle, were almost the
only persons whom I sometimes went to see. To the first I showed my
comedy of Narcissus. He was pleased with it, and had the goodness to
make in it some improvements. Diderot, younger than these, was much
about my own age. He was fond of music, and knew it theoretically; we
conversed together, and he communicated to me some of his literary
projects. This soon formed betwixt us a more intimate connection, which
lasted fifteen years, and which probably would still exist were not I,
unfortunately, and by his own fault, of the same profession with himself.

It would be impossible to imagine in what manner I employed this short
and precious interval which still remained to me, before circumstances
forced me to beg my bread:--in learning by memory passages from the poets
which I had learned and forgotten a hundred times. Every morning at ten
o'clock, I went to walk in the Luxembourg with a Virgil and a Rousseau in
my pocket, and there, until the hour of dinner, I passed away the time in
restoring to my memory a sacred ode or a bucolic, without being
discouraged by forgetting, by the study of the morning, what I had
learned the evening before. I recollected that after the defeat of
Nicias at Syracuse the captive Athenians obtained a livelihood by
reciting the poems of Homer. The use I made of this erudition to ward
off misery was to exercise my happy memory by learning all the poets by
rote.