This dwelling where Jean Jacques passed so many of his “rares bons jours” of his
Les Charmettes
75 · McManus
1909
adventurous life has been bought by the city, and will henceforth be guarded as a public monument, a tourist shrine like the Chateau des Ducs and La Grande Chartreuse. Here Madame de Warens will reign again in the effigy of a reproduction of Quentin de la Tour’s famous portrait, possessed of that “air caressant et tendre” and “sourire angelique” which so captured the author of the “Confessions.” Arthur Young, that observant English agriculturalist, who travelled so extensively in France, paid a warm tribute to Rousseau’s good fairy when he wrote: “There was something so amiable in her character that in spite of her frailties her name rests among those few memories connected with us by ties more easily felt than described.”
In one of his stories Alphonse Daudet tells us of a bourgeois who had purchased an old chateau, and was driven away from it by the ghosts of the family which had preceded him as proprietors. Surely something of the same kind might have happened to that citizen of the United States who proposed to transport “Les Charmettes” to Chicago. The offer was declined and that is how the city of Chambéry came to possess it for all time. It is well that this took place, for there is hardly a house in Europe in which one would imagine that the ghosts of history would so persistently survive.
Not only was “Les Charmettes” and Madame de Warens connected so intimately, but they were also associated with another name less known in the world of letters. Hear what the “Confessions” has to say:
“He was a young man from Viaud; his father, named Vintzinried, was a self-styled captain of the Chateau de Chillon on Lac Leman. The son was a hair-dresser’s assistant and was running about the world in that quality when he came to present himself to Madame de Warens, who received him well, as she did all travellers, and especially those from her own country. He was a big, dull blond, well-made enough, his face insipid, his intelligence the same, speaking like a beautiful Leander ... vain, stupid, ignorant, insolent.” For the rest one is referred to the “Confessions.”