It was arranged that young Gibbon should be put into the care of the worthy Pastor Daniel Pavilliard, a rather unusually broad-minded, sweet-tempered, and highly educated professor, the secretary and librarian of the Academy, afterwards its principal. He was then probably living in the parsonage of the First Deacon in the Rue de la Cité derrière, now a police-station, a picturesque house with high roof, with long vaulted corridors and wide galleries in the rear, from which could be seen the Alps beyond the Flon and the heights to the southeast of the city.
The plan of giving the boy a good cold bath of Presbyterianism worked better than would have been believed possible. Like a piece of hot iron dipped into ice-water he came out quite changed. He hissed and sizzled for a while, and then hardened into a free-thinker. It is odd how people can throw off a form of religion as if it were a cloak.
It was a trying experience for the lad. Madame Pavilliard, whose name was Carbonella, did not pattern after her husband. According to Gibbon she was narrow, mean and grasping, disagreeable and lacking in refinement. He could not speak French; they could not speak English. He gives a pathetic account of his misery; telling how he was obliged to exchange an elegant apartment in Magdalen College “for a narrow, gloomy street, the most infrequented of an unhandsome town, for an old inconvenient house and for a small chamber, ill-contrived and ill-furnished, which at the approach of winter, instead of a companionable fire, must be warmed by the dull, invisible heat of a stove.” His earliest entry in the diary which he kept said:—“First aspect horrid—house, slavery, ignorance, exile.” He felt that his “condition seemed as destitute of hope as it was devoid of pleasure.”
After a while, however, his natural good spirits rallied. He wrote his father: “The people here are extremely civil to strangers, and endeavor to make this town as agreeable as possible.”
He began to join the young people in making excursions, and he wrote home asking permission to take riding lessons. Pastor Pavilliard encouraged him to join in the gayeties of the town. There were dances; there were concerts with violins, harpsichords, flutes and singing.
He soon made the acquaintance of Georges Deyverdun, a young man a little older than himself, of high character and aristocratic connections. Deyverdun’s early diaries are extant and often mention walking with M. de Guiben or de Guibon. They became life-long friends. A book which had great influence on Gibbon was a “Logic” written by Professor Jean Pierre de Crousaz, who, after a life of great honours and wide experiences, had died three years before Gibbon’s arrival at Lausanne.
Voltaire wrote him: “You have made Lausanne the temple of the Muses and you have more than once caused me to say that, if I had been able to leave France, I would have withdrawn to Lausanne.”
De Crousaz’s “Logic” fortified Gibbon to engage in a battle for his faith. He had lively discussions with Pavilliard, but gradually “the various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream;” and after a full conviction, on Christmas-day, 1754, he received the sacrament in the church of Lausanne.
Gibbon’s “return to the light” caused a lively joy in the Assembly which voted that the Dean should congratulate him on such a sensible act. He was examined and found “perfectly enlightened upon religion and remarkably well informed on all and each of the articles separating them from the Church of Rome.”