This, we may
notice in passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of
the fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left
the least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and
thought of it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the
want of space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and
preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither
window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw
to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself.
"I manufactured," he says, "a good bed out of my coats and shirts,
sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out of my old
cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a
table of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, and
arranged some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I made
myself so comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows,
I was nearly as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my
lodgings in Paris. My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers,
with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my
dining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat,
and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew,
to warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was neither
writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk in
the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out on
to the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out. I
passed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole three
weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness."[115]

These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but
his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable
periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain
gaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that
an earlier century would have counted unholy.[116] He rarely sought
pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had
a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the
degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's
work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one
from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.[