as pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity
reigned in our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage,
and we shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls!
After dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I
collected dry sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by
botanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of
tenderness and effusion."[101] This is one of such days as the soul
turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized it,
and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of
irrecoverable things.

He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de Warens with an inalterable
fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her with all
the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to him
something dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell was
this. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the disorder
of the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction derived from
the rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from a
polypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if he
did not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only leaving it for
adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to consult the
physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his
benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was always
open to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a
travelling companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of
Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to
discover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was
dull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the
weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated
whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to
Chamberi. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the
iron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan
virtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps
learnt a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom he
describes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled.
Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom
his travelling diversions had made a Pharisee for the hour. He
protested, but Madame de Warens