irers, as the genuine voice of nature and passion. Fourteen
weeks insensibly stole away; but had I been rich and independent, I
should have prolonged, and perhaps have fixed, my residence at Paris.

Between the expensive style of Paris and of Italy it was prudent to
interpose some months of tranquil simplicity; and at the thoughts of
Lausanne I again lived in the pleasures and studies of my early youth.
Shaping my course through Dijon and Besancon, in the last of which
places I was kindly entertained by my cousin Acton, I arrived in
the month of May 1763 on the banks of the Leman Lake. It had been
my intention to pass the Alps in the autumn, but such are the simple
attractions of the place, that the year had almost expired before my
departure from Lausanne in the ensuing spring. An absence of five years
had not made much alteration in manners, or even in persons. My old
friends, of both sexes, hailed my voluntary return; the most genuine
proof of my attachment. They had been flattered by the present of my
book, the produce of their soil; and the good Pavilliard shed tears of
joy as he embraced a pupil, whose literary merit he might fairly impute
to his own labours. To my old list I added some new acquaintance, and
among the strangers I shall distinguish Prince Lewis of Wirtemberg, the
brother of the reigning Duke, at whose country-house, near Lausanne, I
frequently dined: a wandering meteor, and at length a falling star, his
light and ambitious spirit had successively dropped from the firmament
of Prussia, of France, and of Austria; and his faults, which he styled
his misfortunes, had driven him into philosophic exile in the Pays de
Vaud. He could now moralize on the vanity of the world, the equality of
mankind, and the happiness of a private station. His address was affable
and polite, and as he had shone in courts and armies, his memory could
supply, and his eloquence could adorn, a copious fund of interesting
anecdotes. His first enthusiasm was that of charity and agriculture; but
the sage gradually lapsed in the saint, and Prince Lewis of Wirtemberg
is now buried in a hermitage near Mayence, in the last stage of mystic
devotion. By some ecclesiastical quarrel, Voltaire had been provoked
to withdraw himself from Lausanne, and retire to his castle at Ferney,
where I again visited the poet and the actor, without seeking his more
intimate acquaintance, to which I might now have pleaded a better title.
But the theatre whi