would have been well; but unfortunately it rapidly carried me away to the
other extreme. From that moment my mind in agitation passed the line of
repose, and its oscillations, continually renewed, have never permitted
it to remain here. I must enter into some detail of this second
revolution; terrible and fatal era, of a fate unparalleled amongst
mortals.

We were but three persons in our retirement; it was therefore natural our
intimacy should be increased by leisure and solitude. This was the case
between Theresa and myself. We passed in conversations in the shade the
most charming and delightful hours, more so than any I had hitherto
enjoyed. She seemed to taste of this sweet intercourse more than I had
until then observed her to do; she opened her heart, and communicated to
me, relative to her mother and family, things she had had resolution
enough to conceal for a great length of time. Both had received from
Madam Dupin numerous presents, made them on my account, and mostly for
me, but which the cunning old woman, to prevent my being angry, had
appropriated to her own use and that of her other children, without
suffering Theresa to have the least share, strongly forbidding her to say
a word to me of the matter: an order the poor girl had obeyed with an
incredible exactness.

But another thing which surprised me more than this had done, was the
discovery that besides the private conversations Diderot and Grimm had
frequently had with both to endeavor to detach them from me, in which,
by means of the resistance of Theresa, they had not been able to succeed,
they had afterwards had frequent conferences with the mother, the subject
of which was a secret to the daughter. However, she knew little presents
had been made, and that there were mysterious goings backward and
forward, the motive of which was entirely unknown to her. When we left