It will appear that for a copyist, who ought to be employed in his business from morning till night, I had many interruptions, which rendered my days not very lucrative, and prevented me from being sufficiently attentive to what I did to do it well; for which reason, half the time I had to myself was lost in erasing errors or beginning my sheet anew.  This daily importunity rendered Paris more unsupportable, and made me ardently wish to be in the country.  I several times went to pass a few days at Mercoussis, the vicar of which was known to Madam le Vasseur, and with whom we all arranged ourselves in such a manner as not to make things disagreeable to him.  Grimm once went thither with us.

[Since I have neglected to relate here a trifling, but memorable adventure I had with the said Grimm one day, on which we were to dine at the fountain of St. Vandrille, I will let it pass:  but when I thought of it afterwards, I concluded that he was brooding in his heart the conspiracy he has, with so much success, since carried into execution.]

The vicar had a tolerable voice, sung well, and, although he did not read music, learned his part with great facility and precision.  We passed our time in singing the trios I had composed at Chenonceaux.  To these I added two or three new ones, to the words Grimm and the vicar wrote, well or ill.  I cannot refrain from regretting these trios composed and sung in moments of pure joy, and which I left at Wootton, with all my music.  Mademoiselle Davenport has perhaps curled her hair with them; but they are worthy of being preserved, and are, for the most part, of very good counterpoint.  It was after one of these little excursions in which I had the pleasure of seeing the aunt at her ease and very cheerful, and in which my spirits were much enlivened, that I wrote to the vicar very rapidly and very ill, an epistle in verse which will be found amongst my papers.

I had nearer to Paris another station much to my liking with M. Mussard, my countryman, relation and friend, who at Passy had made himself a charming retreat, where I have passed some very peaceful moments.  M. Mussard was a jeweller, a man of good sense, who, after having acquired a genteel fortune, had given his only daughter in marriage to M. de Valmalette, the son of an exchange broker, and maitre d’hotel to the king, took the wise resolution to quit business in his declining years, and to place an interval of repose and enjoyment between the hurry and the end of life.  The good man Mussard, a real philosopher in practice, lived without care, in a very pleasant house which he himself had built in a very pretty garden, laid out with his own hands.  In digging the terraces of this garden he found fossil shells, and in such great quantities that his lively imagination saw nothing but shells in nature.  He really thought the universe was composed of shells and the remains of shells, and that the whole earth was only