It will appear that for a copyist, who ought to be employed in his business from morning till night, I had many interruptions, which rendered my days not very lucrative and prevented me from being sufficiently attentive to what I did to do it well; for which reason, half the time I had to myself was lost in erasing errors or beginning my sheet anew.This daily importunity rendered Paris more unsupportable, and made me ardently wish to be in the country.Iseveral times went to pass a few days at Marcoussis, the vicar of which was known to Madam le Vasseur, and with whom we all arranged ourselves in such a manner as not to make things disagreeable to him.Grimm once went thither with us.* The vicar had a tolerable voice, sung well, and, although he did not read music, learned his part with great facility and precision.We passed our time in singing the trios I had composed at Chenonceaux.To these I added two or three new ones, to the words Grimm and the vicar wrote, well or ill.I cannot refrain from regretting these trios composed and sung in moments of pure joy, and which I left at Wootton, with all my music.
Mademoiselle Davenport has perhaps curled her hair with them; but they are worthy of being preserved, and are, for the most part, of very good counterpoint.It was after one of these little excursions in which I had the pleasure of seeing the aunt at her ease and very cheerful, and in which my spirits were much enlivened, that I wrote to the vicar very rapidly and very ill, an epistle in verse which will be found amongst my papers.
* Since I have neglected to relate here a trifling, hut memorable adventure I had with the said Grimm one day, on which we were to dine at the fountain of St.Vandrille, I will let it pass: hut when I thought of it afterwards, I concluded that he was brooding in his heart the conspiracy he has, with so much success, since carried into execution.
I had nearer to Paris another station much to my liking with M.
Mussard, my countryman, relation, and friend, who at Passy had made himself a charming retreat, where I have passed some very peaceful moments.M.Mussard was a jeweler, a man of good sense, who, after having acquired a genteel fortune, had given his only daughter in marriage to M.de Valmalette, the son of an exchange broker, and maitre d'hotel to the king, took the wise resolution to quit business in his declining years, and to place an interval, of repose and enjoyment between the hurry and the end of life.The good man Mussard, a real philosopher in practice, lived without care, in a very pleasant house which he himself had built in a very pretty garden, laid out with his own hands.In digging the terraces of this garden he found fossil shells, and in such great quantities that his lively imagination saw nothing but shells in nature.He really thought the universe was composed of shells and the remains of shells and that the whole earth was only the sand of these in different stratae.His attention thus constantly engaged with his singular discoveries, his imagination became so heated with the ideas they gave him, that, in his head, they would soon have been converted into a system, that is into folly, if, happily for his reason, but unfortunately for his friends, to whom he was dear, and to whom his house was an agreeable asylum, a most cruel and extraordinary disease had not put an end to his existence.A constantly increasing tumor in his stomach prevented him from eating, long before the cause of it was discovered, and, after several years of suffering, absolutely occasioned him to die of hunger.I can never, without the greatest affliction of mind, call to my recollection the last moments of this worthy man, who still received with so much pleasure, Leneips and myself, the only friends whom the sight of his sufferings did not separate from him until his last hour, when he was reduced to devouring with his eyes the repasts he had placed before us, scarcely having the power of swallowing a few drops of weak tea, which came up again a moment afterwards.But before these days of sorrow, how many have I passed at his house, with the chosen friends he had made himself! At the head of the list I place the Abbe Prevot, a very amiable man, and very sincere, whose heart vivified his writings, worthy of immortality, and who, neither in his disposition nor in society, had the least of the melancholy coloring he gave to his works: Procope, the physician, a little AEsop, a favorite with the ladies; Boulanger, the celebrated posthumous author of Despotisme Oriental, and who, I am of opinion, extended the systems of Mussard on the duration of the world.The female part of his friends consisted of Madam Denis, niece to Voltaire, who, at that time, was nothing more than a good kind of woman, and pretended not to wit: Madam Vanloo, certainly not handsome, but charming, and who sang like an angel: Madam de Valmalette, herself, who sang also, and who, although very thin, would have been very amiable had she had fewer pretensions.Such, or very nearly such, was the society of M.Mussard, with which I should have been much pleased, had not his conchyliomania more engaged my attention; and Ican say, with great truth, that, for upwards of six months, I worked with him in his cabinet with as much pleasure as he felt himself.