the Alps in all
possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement which
hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemed
the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined
rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams,
bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade,
voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a
charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward
without knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval
as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life.
It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive
sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.

The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth
found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary
monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who
pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and
Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being
supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly
forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion
was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the
parties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into the
circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mischievous
zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow
and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them
was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought up
in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost
this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with
which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not
bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his
present destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the
holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit."
"The sophism which destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent
pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that
exaggerates our condemnation, "is that of most men, who complain of lack
of strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is only
through our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could be
always sage,