Rousseau considers that he owes it to his sincerity, and to the instruction of mankind, to confess the covert pleasures of his life; he even supposes that he is being seriously questioned and asked for an account of his sins with the donne pericolante of Venice. Had I prostituted myself to the courtesans of Paris, I should not have thought myself obliged to inform posterity of the fact; but I was too shy on the one hand, too much exalted on the other, to allow myself to be seduced by women of the town. When I passed through groups of these unfortunates falling upon the passers-by in order to drag them up to their rooms, like the Saint-Cloud cabmen trying to induce travellers to enter their flies, I was seized with horror and disgust. The pleasures of adventure would have suited me only in the days of old.
In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, our imperfect civilization, our superstitious beliefs, our strange and half-barbarous customs mingled romance with everything: characters were strongly marked, imagination was powerful, existence mysterious and concealed. At night, around the high walls of the graveyards and convents, beneath the deserted ramparts of the town, along the chains and ditches of the market-places, on the skirts of enclosures in narrow, lampless streets, where robbers and murderers lay in ambush, where meetings took place sometimes by torchlight, sometimes in the thick of darkness, it was at the risk of his head that one sought the trysting-place granted by some Héloïse. To abandon himself to disorder, one had really to love; to violate public morals, one had to make great sacrifices. Not only was it a matter of confronting fortuitous dangers and defying the sword of the law, but one was obliged to overcome the empire of regular habits, the authority of the family, the tyranny of domestic customs, the opposition of conscience, the terrors and duties of the Christian. All these obstacles doubled the energy of the passions.
In 1788, I would not have followed a starving wretch who would have dragged me to the den where she lived under police supervision; but it is probable that, in 1606, I should have seen the end of an adventure of the kind which Bassompierre[204] has told so well.
*
"Five or six months ago," says the marshal, "each time that I passed over the Petit Pont"—for in those days the Pont Neuf was not built—"a pretty woman, a sempstress at the sign of the Two Angels, made me deep courtesies and followed me with her eyes as far as she could; and as I had heeded her action, I also looked at her and greeted her with greater care.
"It happened that when I arrived from Fontainebleau in Paris, passing over the Petit Pont, so soon as she saw me coming, she put herself at the door of her shop, and said, as I passed:
"'Sir, I am your servant.'
"I returned her greeting, and turning round from time to time, I saw that she followed me with her eyes as far as she could."
Bassompierre obtained an assignation.
Bassompierre's adventure.