stirred the leaves, the air was 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 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.