nce we do not know. He was fascinated by a
flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose company he wasted many hours, and
the precious stuff of youthful opportunity. He passed a summer day in
joyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again,
but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with him
remained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in
some of the traits of the new Heloisa and her friend Claire.[59] Then he
accepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens
to attend her home to Freiburg. On this expedition he paid an hour's
visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon. Returning
from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that might
be taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook to
teach music. "I have already," he says, "noted some moments of
inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself. Behold me now a
teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air. Without the
least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all
the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I
gave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de
Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his
house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to
work to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I
knew all about it." The performance came off duly, and the strange
impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master.
Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted the
ears of men.[60] Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars,
but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did not lack
either hope or charity. "How is it," Rousseau cried, many years after
this, "that having found so many good people in my youth, I find so few
in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No; but the class in
which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in which I found
them then. Among the common people, where great passions only speak at
intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard oftener. In
the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the mask of
sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks."[61]

From Lausanne he went to Neuchatel, where he had more success, for,
teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no succ