easily, and her father at my request gave me bills of exchange to the
amount of a hundred thousand florins, with a note of two hundred thousand
florins authorizing me to draw upon him till the whole sum was exhausted.
Just as I was going, Esther gave me fifty shirts and fifty handkerchiefs
of the finest quality.

It was not my love for Manon Baletti, but a foolish vanity and a desire
to cut a figure in the luxurious city of Paris, which made me leave
Holland. But such was the disposition that Mother Nature had given me
that fifteen months under The Leads had not been enough to cure this
mental malady of mine. But when I reflect upon after events of my life I
am not astonished that The Leads proved ineffectual, for the numberless
vicissitudes which I have gone through since have not cured me--my
disorder, indeed, being of the incurable kind. There is no such thing as
destiny. We ourselves shape our lives, notwithstanding that saying of the
Stoics, 'Volentem ducit, nolentem trahit'.

After promising Esther to return before the end of the year, I set out
with a clerk of the company who had brought the French securities, and I
reached the Hague, where Boaz received me with a mingled air of wonder
and admiration. He told me that I had worked a miracle; "but," he added,
"to succeed thus you must have persuaded them that peace was on the point
of being concluded."

"By no means," I answered; "so far from my persuading them, they are of
the opposite opinion; but all the same I may tell you that peace is
really imminent."

"If you like to give me that assurance in writing," said he, "I will make
you a present of fifty thousand florins' worth of diamonds."