Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not degrade :-" I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench, as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious night outside the town [Lyons], in a road which ran by the side of either the Rhone or the Saône, I forget which of the two. Gardens raised on a terrace bordered the other side of the road. It had been very hot all day, and the evening was delightful; the dew moistened the parched grass, the night was profoundly still, the air fresh without being cold; the sun in going down had left red vapours in the heaven, and they turned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace sheltered nightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of ecstasy, surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of it all, and only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone. Absorbed in the sweetness of my musing, I prolonged my ramble far into the night, without ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I found it out. I lay down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or false doorway made in the wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was formed by overarching tree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my head, and I fell asleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my awaking more delicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked on sun and water and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up and gave myself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town, resolved to spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I still had left. I was in such joyful spirits, that I went along the road singing lustily." 1

There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and which only found

1 Conf., iv. 290, 291.

its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by accident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any thought of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies, among them that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never entered into his dreams. When the time for authorship actually came, his work had all the benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, it had all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.

One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century. One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site which he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant, half dead with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing more restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a small trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some meat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then he explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss and knew none of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on account of the duties, and his bread on account of the taille, and declared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was not dying of hunger. All this made an impression on Rousseau which he never forgot. "Here," he says, "was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred which afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harass the common people, and against all their oppressors. This man actually did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow, and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned around him."

1

It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company, that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to

1 Conf. iv. 281-283.

the attack upon the old order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many, whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime elements of the human lot.

III.

It was, then, sometime towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived at Chambéri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had procured him employment in connexion with a land survey which the government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk, who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and ill-smelling fellow-workers.1 If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any set of circumstances, his method was invariable ; he ran away from them. So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular and grotesque endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a possible thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there, but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the fixing of an hour. In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the same end as all the others. He next rushed to Besançon in

1 Conf., v. 325.

search of the musical instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage was confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.1 Finally he abandoned the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow resources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly indefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite and miscellaneous affairs,—if we are here, as so often, to give the name of affairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road to ruin.

The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame de Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was her factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words, firm, thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of his mistress admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when Madame de Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of youth, Rousseau was delivered from them in an equivocal way by solicitous application of the same maxims of comprehension. "Although Claude Anet was as young as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that he looked upon us as two children worthy of indulgence, and we both looked upon him as a respectable man, whose esteem it was our business to conciliate. Thus there grew up between us three a companionship, perhaps without another example like it upon earth. All our wishes, our cares, our hearts were in common; nothing seemed to pass outside our little circle. The habit of living together, and of living together exclusively, became so strong that if at our meals one of the three was absent, or there came a fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of our peculiar relations, a tête-à-tête was less sweet than a meeting of all three." 2 Fate interfered to spoil this striking attempt after a new type of the family, developed on a duandric base. Claude Anet was seized with illness, a consequence of excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition in search of plants, and he came to his end. In him Rousseau always believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, "a rare and estimable man, in whom nature 2 Conf., v. 349–350.

1 Conf., v. 360-364. Corr., i. 21—24.

3 Apparently in the summer of 1736, though the reference to the return of the French troops at the peace (Conf., v. 365), would place it in 1735.

served instead of education, and who nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men." The day after his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost friend to Madame de Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction, when suddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he should inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly a handsome black coat. A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always somewhat nauseously called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought and washed away its last traces. After all, those men and women are exceptionally happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought standing against themselves in that unwritten chapter of their lives which even the most candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast recollection.

2

Shortly after his return to Chambéri, a wave from the great tide of European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the February of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in the choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France was for Stanislaus, the father-inlaw of Lewis xv., while the Emperor Charles vi. and Anne of Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony. Stanislaus was compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking up his quarrel, declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The first act of this war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and the two Sicilies by Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the despatch of a French expedition to the Milanese under marshal Villars, the husband of one of Voltaire's first idols. This took place in the autumn of 1733, and a French column passed through Chambéri, exciting lively interest in all minds, including Rousseau's. He now read the newspapers for the first time, with the most eager sympathy for the country with whose history his own name was destined to be so permanently associated. "If this mad passion," he says, "had only been momentary, I should not speak of it; but for no visible reason it took such root in my heart, that when I afterwards at Paris played the stern republican, I could not help feeling in spite of myself a secret predilection for the very nation that I found so