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 _tete-a-tete_ was less sweet than a meeting of all
three."[70] 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.[71] In him Rousseau always
believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, "a rare
and estimable man, in whom nature served instead of education, and who
nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men."[72] 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.[73] 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.

Shortly after his return to Chamberi, 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-in-law 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 und