flatters me in doing a good action and pleasing another. I except those payments about which one must needs haggle and calculate; for if there is no one to whom I can give charge of them, I shamefully and unjustly postpone them as long as I can, in dread of this altercation with which both my disposition and my manner of talking are completely incompatible. There is nothing that I hate so much as haggling; it is a mere interchange of cheating and impudence. After an hour of wrangling and chaffering, one and the other side sacrifices his word and his oaths for a charge of five sous. Nevertheless I was at a disadvantage in borrowing; for, not having the courage to ask by word of mouth, I used to commit the chance to paper, which produces little effect, and which makes it very easy to refuse. I entrusted the conduct of my needs to the stars more gaily and more freely than I have since done to my own providence and my good sense. Good managers think it horrible to be in such uncertainty, and do not consider, in the first place, that most of the world lives so. How many worthy men have thrown overboard all their assured well-being, and do it every day, to seek the wind of the favour of kings and of Fortune! Cæsar, to become Cæsar, incurred debts to the amount of a million in gold, besides using all he was worth;[1] and how many merchants begin their commerce by the sale of their farms, which they send to the Indies,
In so great a drying-up of piety we have thousands and thousands of colleges[3] which go on easily, awaiting every day, from the liberality of Heaven, what they must have to dine. In the second place, they do not consider that this certainty on which they rely is scarcely less uncertain and matter of chance than chance itself. I see poverty as near, outside of[4] two thousand crowns a year, as if it were close at hand. For besides the fact that fate has the power to open a hundred breaches for want to enter in through our riches,
