learned very early that our health is always impaired by some excess
either of food or abstinence, and I never had any physician except
myself. I am bound to add that the excess in too little has ever proved
in me more dangerous than the excess in too much; the last may cause
indigestion, but the first causes death.

Now, old as I am, and although enjoying good digestive organs, I must
have only one meal every day; but I find a set-off to that privation in
my delightful sleep, and in the ease which I experience in writing down
my thoughts without having recourse to paradox or sophism, which would be
calculated to deceive myself even more than my readers, for I never could
make up my mind to palm counterfeit coin upon them if I knew it to be
such.

The sanguine temperament rendered me very sensible to the attractions of
voluptuousness: I was always cheerful and ever ready to pass from one
enjoyment to another, and I was at the same time very skillful in
inventing new pleasures. Thence, I suppose, my natural disposition to
make fresh acquaintances, and to break with them so readily, although
always for a good reason, and never through mere fickleness. The errors
caused by temperament are not to be corrected, because our temperament is
perfectly independent of our strength: it is not the case with our
character. Heart and head are the constituent parts of character;
temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character
is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and
improved.

I leave to others the decision as to the good or evil tendencies of my
character, but such as it is it shines upon my countenance, and there it
can easily be detected by any physiognomist. It is only on the fact that