was a woman of principle, and declined
to let Rousseau, who had profited by the doctrine of indifference, now
set up in his own favour the contrary doctrine of a narrow and churlish
partiality. So a short, delicious, and never-forgotten episode came to
an end: this pair who had known so much happiness together were happy
together no more, and the air became peopled for Rousseau with wan
spectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares.

The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books
of the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted
more than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the
contradictions between the dates of the Confessions and the more
authentic and unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, he
describes a visit to Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec's
temporary pacification of the civic troubles of that town; and that
event took place in the spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier
journey, which he says came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but
the letters to Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated
in the autumn and winter of 1737.[102] Minor verifications attest the
exactitude of the dates of the letters,[103] and we may therefore
conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his place taken and
lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part of 1738. In
the tenth of the Reveries he speaks of having passed "a space of four or
five years" in the bliss of Les Charmettes, and it is true that his
connection with it in one way and another lasted from the middle of 1736
until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for Montpellier in the
autumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738,
the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes perhaps only
lasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set a deep mark
on a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things bitter
and sweet.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] _Conf._, iii. 177.

[39] Lamartine in _Raphael_ defies "a reasonable man to recompose with
any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of
the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of
these elements excludes the other." It is worth while for any who care
for this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise
de Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of
the seventeenth cent