to him, and which I was employed to
dress up in terms different from those in which it was conveyed to us.
As he read nothing of what I laid before him, except the despatches for
the court, and signed those to other ambassadors without reading them,
this left me more at liberty to give what turn I thought proper to the
latter, and in these therefore I made the articles of information cross
each other. But it was impossible for-me to do the same by despatches of
importance; and I thought myself happy when M. de Montaigu did not take
it into his head to cram into them an impromptu of a few lines after his
manner. This obliged me to return, and hastily transcribe the whole
despatch decorated with his new nonsense, and honor it with the cipher,
without which he would have refused his signature. I was frequently
almost tempted, for the sake of his reputation, to cipher something
different from what he had written, but feeling that nothing could
authorize such a deception, I left him to answer for his own folly,
satisfying myself with having spoken to him with freedom, and discharged
at my own peril the duties of my station. This is what I always did with
an uprightness, a zeal and courage, which merited on his part a very
different recompense from that which in the end I received from him. It
was time I should once be what Heaven, which had endowed me with a happy
disposition, what the education that had been given me by the best of
women, and that I had given myself, had prepared me for, and I became so.
Left to my own reflections, without a friend or advice, without
experience, and in a foreign country, in the service of a foreign nation,
surrounded by a crowd of knaves, who, for their own interest, and to
avoid the scandal of good example, endeavored to prevail upon me to
imitate them; far from yielding to their solicitations, I served France
well, to which I owed nothing, and the ambassador still better, as it was
right and just I should do to the utmost of my power. Irreproachable in
a post, sufficiently exposed to censure, I merited and obtained the
esteem of the republic, that of all the ambassadors with whom we were in
correspondence, and the affection of the French who resided at Venice,
not even excepting the consul, whom with regret I supplanted in the
functions which I knew belonged to him, and which occasioned me more
embarrassment than they afforded me satisfaction.

M. de Montaigu, confiding without reser