At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed, Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau had set to music--that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaïre owed his seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money, and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil, for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came to him by the death of his father.[137] He found the letter, and was opening it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame at his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece, undressed, slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning, he had forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was delighted to find that it contained his money, but "I can swear," he adds, "that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself." An occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother acquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born child was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings. Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on the part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and with such entire absence of any precaution with a view to their identification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of the day of their birth.[138]