As I shall let you remain at Paris without any person to direct your conduct, I flatter myself that you will not make a bad use of the confidence I repose in you.  I do not require that you should lead the life of a Capuchin friar; quite the contrary:  I recommend pleasures to you; but I expect that they shall be the pleasures of a gentleman.  Those add brilliancy to a young man’s character; but debauchery vilifies and degrades it.  I shall have very true and exact accounts of your conduct; and, according to the informations I receive, shall be more, or less, or not at all, yours.  Adieu.

P. S. Do not omit writing to me once a-week; and let your answer to this letter be in French.  Connect yourself as much as possible with the foreign ministers; which is properly traveling into different countries, without going from one place.  Speak Italian to all the Italians, and German to all the Germans you meet, in order not to forget those two languages.

I wish you, my dear friend, as many happy new years as you deserve, and not one more.  May you deserve a great number!

ETEXT EDITORS BOOKMARKS: 

Absurd romances of the two last centuries
Advocate, the friend, but not the bully of virtue
Ariosto
Assurance and intrepidity
Attention
Author is obscure and difficult in his own language
Characters, that never existed, are insipidly displayed
Collana
Commanding with dignity, you must serve up to it with diligence
Complaisance to every or anybody’s opinion
Conceal all your learning carefully
Connections
Contempt
Content yourself with mediocrity in nothing
Court mores
Dance to those who pipe
Dante
Decides peremptorily upon every subject
Desire to please, and that is the main point
Desirous to make you their friend
Despairs of ever being able to pay
Difference in everything between system and practice
Dignity to be kept up in pleasures, as well as in business
Distinction between simulation and dissimulation
Do not mistake the tinsel of Tasso for the gold of Virgil
Doing what may deserve to be written
Done under concern and embarrassment, must be ill done
Dressed as the generality of people of fashion are
Economist of your time
Economists
Establishing a character of integrity and good manners
Feed him, and feed upon him at the same time
Flattery
Fortune stoops to the forward and the bold
Frivolous and superficial pertness
Gentlemen, who take such a fancy to you at first sight
Guard against those who make the most court to you
Have no pleasures but your own
If you will persuade, you must first please
Improve yourself with the old, divert yourself with the young
Indiscriminately loading their memories with every part alike
Insipid in his pleasures, as inefficient in everything else
Labor more to put them in conceit with themselves