It was the custom to return to Chambéri for the winter, and the day of their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and tearful for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the trees, the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved companion. At the first melting of the winter snows they left their dungeon in Chambéri, and they never missed the earliest song of the nightingale. Many a joyful day of summer peace remained vivid in Rousseau's memory, and made a mixed heaven and hell for him long years after in the stifling dingy Paris street, and the raw and cheerless air of a Derbyshire winter.[100] "We started early in the morning," he says, describing one of these simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis, who was the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, "together and alone; I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of the valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent our provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went from hill to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often in the shade, resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for whole hours; chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offering unheard prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the bliss of this day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, and the little streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves, the air was pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity reigned in our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage, and we shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls! After dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I collected dry sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by botanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of tenderness and effusion."[101] This is one of such days as the soul turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized it, and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of irrecoverable things.
He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de Warens with an inalterable fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her with all the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to him something dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell was this. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the disorder of the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction derived from the rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from a polypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if he did not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only leaving it for adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to consult the physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was always open to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a travelling companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to discover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was dull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to Chambéri. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the iron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan virtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps learnt a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom he describes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled. Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom his travelling diversions had made a Pharisee for the hour. He protested, but Madame de Warens was a woman of principle, and declined to let Rousseau, who had profited by the doctrine of indifference, now set up in his own favour the contrary doctrine of a narrow and churlish partiality. So a short, delicious, and never-forgotten episode came to an end: this pair who had known so much happiness together were happy together no more, and the air became peopled for Rousseau with wan spectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares.
The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books of the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted more than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the contradictions between the dates of the Confessions and the more authentic and unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, he describes a visit to Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec's temporary pacification of the civic troubles of that town; and that event took place in the spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier journey, which he says came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but the letters to Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated in the autumn and winter of 1737.[102] Minor verifications attest the exactitude of the dates of the letters,[103] and we may therefore conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his place taken and lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part of 1738. In the tenth of the Rêveries he speaks of having passed "a space of four or five years" in the bliss of Les Charmettes, and it is true that his connection with it in one way and another lasted from the middle of 1736 until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for Montpellier in the autumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738, the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes perhaps only lasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set a deep mark on a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things bitter and sweet.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] Conf., iii. 177.
[39] Lamartine in Raphael defies "a reasonable man to recompose with any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of these elements excludes the other." It is worth while for any who care for this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise de Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of the seventeenth century.
[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de Bernex, printed in Mélanges, pp. 139-144.
[41] De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the sexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of religion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the doctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the gratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give food and drink to the starving. Picot's Hist. de Genève, vol. ii.
[42] Conf., v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.
[43] Conf., v. 345.