LVIII.
I completely altered my habits from that day, from respect for my poor mother's repeated sacrifices, and the concentration of all my thoughts in this one desire,—to see once more my love, and to prolong, as much as possible, by the strictest economy, the allotted time I was to spend with Julie. I became as calculating and as sparing of the little gold I took with me as an old miser. It seemed as though the most trifling sum I spent was an hour of my happiness, or a drop of my felicity that I wasted. I resolved to live like Jean Jacques Rousseau, on little or nothing, and to retrench from my vanity, my dress, or my food, all that I wished to bestow on the rapture of my soul. I was not, however, without an undefined hope of making some use of my talents in the cause of my love. These were as yet made known to a few friends only by some verses; but in the last three months I had written during my sleepless nights a little volume of poetry, amatory, melancholy, or pious, according as my imagination spoke to me in tender or in serious notes. The whole had been copied out with care in my best handwriting, and shown to my father, who was an excellent critic, though somewhat severe; a few friends, too, had favorably judged some fragments. I had bound up my poetical treasure in green, a color of good omen for my hopes of fame; but I had not shown it to my mother, whose chaste and pious purity of mind might have taken alarm at the more antique than Christian voluptuousness of some of my elegies. I hoped that the simple grace and the winged enthusiasm of my poetry might please some intelligent publisher, who would buy my volume, or at least consent to print it at his own expense; and that the public taste, attracted by the novelty of a style springing from the heart, and nursed in the woods, would, perhaps, confer on me a humble fortune and a name.