was the first love, or the first
delirium, if you will, of the young man. The birthplace of that love,
the arbor where Rousseau made his first avowal, the room where he
blushed at his first emotions, the yard where he gloried in the most
humble offices to serve his beloved protectress, the spreading
chestnut-trees beneath which they sat together to speak of God, and
intermingled their sportive theology with bursts of merriment and
childish caresses, the landscape, mysterious and wild as they, which
seems so well adapted to them,--have all, for the lover, the poet, or
the philosopher, a deep and hidden attraction. They yield to it without
knowing why. For poets this was the first page of that life which was a
poem; for philosophers it was the cradle of a revolution; for lovers it
is the birthplace of first love.

XLIII.

We followed the stony path at the bottom of the ravine which leads to
Les Charmettes, still talking of this love. We were alone. The
goat-herds even had forsaken the dried-up pastures and the leafless
hedges. The sun shone now and then between the passing clouds, and its
concentrated rays were warmer within the sheltered sides of the ravine.
The redbreasts hopped about the bushes almost within our reach. Every
now and then we would sit on the southern bank of the road to read a
page or two of the "Confessions," and identify ourselves with the
place.

We fancied we saw the young vagrant in his tattered clothes, knocking
at the gate and delivering, with a blush, his letter of recommendation
to the fair recluse, in the lonely path that leads from the house to
the church. They were so present to our fancy, that it seemed as though
they were expecting us, and that we should see them at the window or in
the garden walks of Les Charmettes. We would walk on, then stop again;
the spot seemed to attract and to repel us by turns, as a place where
love had been revealed, but where love had been profaned also. It
presented no such perils to us. We were destined to carry away our love
from thence as pure and as divine as we had brought it there within us.

"Oh," I inwardly exclaimed, "were I a Rousseau, what might not this
other Madame de Warens have made me; she who is as superior to her of
Les Charmettes as I am inferior to Rousseau, not in feeling, but in
genius."

Absorbed in these thoughts, we walked up a shelving greensward upon
which a few walnut-trees were scattered here and there. These trees ha