thing that was capable of doing me hurt in the
world. I was to shun him as we would shun a spectre, or even the devil,
if he was actually in our way; and it cost me after the rate of a
hundred and fifty livres a month, and very cheap too, to have this
creature constantly kept in view. That is to say, my spy undertook never
to let him be out of his sight an hour, but so as that he could give an
account of him, which was much the easier for to be done considering his
way of living; for he was sure that, for whole weeks together, he would
be ten hours of the day half asleep on a bench at the tavern-door where
he quartered, or drunk within the house. Though this wicked life he led
sometimes moved me to pity him, and to wonder how so well-bred,
gentlemanly a man as he once was could degenerate into such a useless
thing as he now appeared, yet at the same time it gave me most
contemptible thoughts of him, and made me often say I was a warning for
all the ladies of Europe against marrying of fools. A man of sense falls
in the world and gets up again, and a woman has some chance for herself;
but with a fool, once fall, and ever undone; once in the ditch, and die
in the ditch; once poor, and sure to starve.

But it is time to have done with him. Once I had nothing to hope for but
to see him again; now my only felicity was, if possible, never to see
him, and, above all, to keep him from seeing me, which, as above, I took
effectual care of.

I was now returned to Paris. My little son of honour, as I called him,
was left at ----, where my last country-seat then was, and I came to
Paris at the prince's request. Thither he came to me as soon as I
arrived, and told me he came to give me joy of my return, and to make
his acknowledgments for that I had given him a son. I thought, indeed,
he had been going to give me a present, and so he did the next day, but
in what he said then he only jested with me. He gave me his company all
the evening, supped with me about midnight, and did me the honour, as I
then called it, to lodge me in his arms all the night, telling me, in
jest, that the best thanks for a son born was giving the pledge for
another.

But as I hinted, so it was; the next morning he laid me down on my
toilet a purse with three hundred pistoles. I saw him lay it down, and
understood what he meant, but I took no notice of it till I came to it,
as it were, casually; then I gave a great cry out, and fell a-scolding
in my way, f