require the care of the governess; it was therefore decided she should
accompany us, and that her mother should remain in the house. After thus
having made our arrangements, we set off on the first of June, 1754.

This was the period when at the age of forty-two, I for the first time in
my life felt a diminution of my natural confidence to which I had
abandoned myself without reserve or inconvenience. We had a private
carriage, in which with the same horses we travelled very slowly.
I frequently got out and walked. We had scarcely performed half our
journey when Theresa showed the greatest uneasiness at being left in the
carriage with Gauffecourt, and when, notwithstanding her remonstrances,
I would get out as usual, she insisted upon doing the same, and walking
with me. I chid her for this caprice, and so strongly opposed it, that
at length she found herself obliged to declare to me the cause whence it
proceeded. I thought I was in a dream; my astonishment was beyond
expression, when I learned that my friend M. de Gauffecourt, upwards of
sixty years of age, crippled by the gout, impotent and exhausted by
pleasures, had, since our departure, incessantly endeavored to corrupt a
person who belonged to his friend, and was no longer young nor handsome,
by the most base and shameful means, such as presenting to her a purse,
attempting to inflame her imagination by the reading of an abominable
book, and by the sight of infamous figures, with which it was filled.
Theresa, full of indignation, once threw his scandalous book out of the
carriage; and I learned that on the first evening of our journey, a
violent headache having obliged me to retire to bed before supper, he had
employed the whole time of this tete-a-tete in actions more worthy of a
satyr than a man of worth and honor, to whom I thought I had intrusted my
companion and myself. What astonishment and grief of heart for me!
I, who until then had believed friendship to be inseparable from every
amiable and noble sentiment which constitutes all its charm, for the