When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise and dismay that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for an indefinite time to Paris.  He never knew the secret of this sudden departure, for no man, he says, was ever so little curious as to the private affairs of his friends.  His heart, completely occupied with the present, filled its whole capacity and entire space with that, and except for past pleasures no empty corner was ever left for what was done with.[57] He says he was too young to take the desertion deeply to heart.  Where he found subsistence we do not know.  He was fascinated by a flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose company he wasted many hours, and the precious stuff of youthful opportunity.  He passed a summer day in joyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again, but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with him remained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in some of the traits of the new Heloisa and her friend Claire.[59] Then he accepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens to attend her home to Freiburg.  On this expedition he paid an hour’s visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon.  Returning from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that might be taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook to teach music.  “I have already,” he says, “noted some moments of inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself.  Behold me now a teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air.  Without the least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I gave myself out for a composer.  Having been presented to M. de Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to work to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I knew all about it.”  The performance came off duly, and the strange impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master.  Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted the ears of men.[60] Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars, but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did not lack either hope or charity.  “How is it,” Rousseau cried, many years after this, “that having found so many good people in my youth, I find so few in my advanced life?  Is their stock exhausted?  No; but the class in which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in which I found them then.  Among the common people, where great passions only speak at intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard oftener.  In the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the mask of sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks."[61]