.

In short, finding no real enjoyment in the midst of the pleasures I had
been most desirous to obtain, I, by sudden mental transitions, returned
in imagination to the serene days of my youth, and sometimes exclaimed
with a sigh: "Ah! this is not Les Charmettes!"

The recollection of the different periods of my life led me to reflect
upon that at which I was arrived, and I found I was already on the
decline, a prey to painful disorders, and imagined I was approaching the
end of my days without having, tasted, in all its plentitude, scarcely
anyone of the pleasures after which my heart had so much thirsted, or
having given scope to the lively sentiments I felt it had in reserve.
I had not favored even that intoxicating voluptuousness with which my
mind was richly stored, and which, for want of an object, was always
compressed, an never exhaled but by signs.

How was it possible that, with a mind naturally expansive, I, with whom
to live was to love, should not hitherto have found a friend entirely
devoted to me; a real friend: I who felt myself so capable of being such
a friend to another? How can it be accounted for that with such warm
affections, such combustible senses, and a heart wholly made up of love,
I had not once, at least, felt its flame for a determinate object?
Tormented by the want of loving, without ever having been able to satisfy
it, I perceived myself approaching the eve of old age, and hastening on
to death without having lived.

These melancholy but affecting recollections led me to others, which,
although accompanied with regret, were not wholly unsatisfactory. I
thought something I had not yet received was still due to me from
destiny.

To what end was I born with exquisite faculties? To suffer them to
remain unemployed? the sentiment of conscious merit, which made me
consider myself as suffering injustice, was some kind of reparation, and
caused me to shed tears which with pleasure I suffered to flow.

These were my mediations during the finest season of the year, in the
month of June, in cool shades, to the songs of the nightingale, and the
warbling of brooks. Everything concurred in plunging me into that too
seducing state of indolence for which I was born, and from which my
austere manner, proceeding from a long effervescence, should forever have
delivered me. I unfortunately remembered the dinner of the Chateau de
Toune, and my meeting with the two charming girls in the same season