severed, they charged me with obstinacy
and pride, proceeding from a want of courage to retract, and insisted
that my life was there a burden to me; in short, that I was very
wretched. M. de Malesherbes believed this really to be the case, and
wrote to me upon the subject. This error in a man for whom I had so much
esteem gave me some pain, and I wrote to him four letters successively,
in which I stated the real motives of my conduct, and made him fully
acquainted with my taste, inclination and character, and with the most
interior sentiments of my heart. These letters, written hastily, almost
without taking pen from paper, and which I neither copied, corrected,
nor even read, are perhaps the only things I ever wrote with facility,
which, in the midst of my sufferings, was, I think, astonishing.
I sighed, as I felt myself declining, at the thought of leaving in the
midst of honest men an opinion of me so far from truth; and by the sketch
hastily given in my four letters, I endeavored, in some measure, to
substitute them to the memoirs I had proposed to write. They are
expressive of my grief to M. de Malesherbes, who showed them in Paris,
and are, besides, a kind of summary of what I here give in detail, and,
on this account, merit preservation. The copy I begged of them some
years afterwards will be found amongst my papers.

The only thing which continued to give me pain, in the idea of my
approaching dissolution, was my not having a man of letters for a friend,
to whom I could confide my papers, that after my death he might take a
proper choice of such as were worthy of publication.

After my journey to Geneva, I conceived a friendship for Moulton; this
young man pleased me, and I could have wished him to receive my last
breath. I expressed to him this desire, and am of opinion he would
readily have complied with it, had not his affairs prevented him from so
doing. Deprived of this consolation, I still wished to give him a mark
of my confidence by sending him the 'Profession of Faith of the Savoyard
Vicar' before it was published. He was pleased with the work, but did
not in his answer seem so fully to expect from it the effect of which I
had but little doubt. He wished to receive from me some fragment which I
had not given to anybody else. I sent him the funeral oration of the
late Duke of Orleans; this I had written for the Abbe Darty, who had not
pronounced it, because, contrary to his expectation, another