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 century.

[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de Bernex, printed in Melanges, pp. 139-144.

[41] De Tavel, by name.  Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the sexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of religion.  In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the doctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the gratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give food and drink to the starving.  Picot’s Hist. de Geneve, vol. ii.

[42] Conf., v. 341.  Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.

[43] Conf., v. 345.

[44] Conf., ii. 83.

[45] Ib. ii. 82.

[46] Ib. iii. 179.  See also 200.

[47] Conf., iii. 177, 178.

[48] Conf., iii. 183.