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The book asserted, for instance, that the Claude of whom he speaks was no longer alive at the time when he was supposed to be enjoying Madame de Warens' favours. We passed French volunteers in blouses bearing a red cross; they shouted and were in high good humour; passed ten districts, where numbers of cretins, with their hideous excrescences, sat by the wayside.
One might have fancied oneself in Paris but for the vibrations of the propeller, the heave of the sea, and the hundred little noises that mark the passage of a ship under way. Later Mademoiselle de Bromsart found herself in the smoking-room alone with her host, Madame de Warens having retired to her state-room and the others gone on deck.
The vague scent of the tobacco threaded up all sorts of things in the girl's mind: Madame de Warens, the streets of Paris, the deck of the yacht.
A few days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, and which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all other wonders disappointed them, convinced him that here was not what he sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame de Warens and more familiar lands.
I thought that if the old man's protection were one day to fail, I would devote myself to her service as a slave, like Rousseau to Madame de Warens; we would take shelter in some secluded cottage of these mountains, or in the well-known chalets of our Savoy; I would live for her, as she would live for me, without looking back with regret to the empty world, and asking of love no other reward than the happiness of loving.
"I saw her," he says, "but in what a state, O God, in what debasement! Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so brilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was torn by the sight!"
Rousseau was submitted to the observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens, and his verdict corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living.
For my part I never could believe that Madame de Warens would have recognized herself in the questionable pages of Rousseau's old age.
On the whole, if we accept the current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so little flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient to people with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or rapacious vanity.
After something more than a year he left Turin on foot, and wandered back to Annecy and to Madame de Warens. The period of Rousseau's life in which that lady was the ruling influence lasted ten or twelve years. The situation was one from which any man of manly instincts would have shrunk, a condition of dependence on a mistress, and on a mistress who made no pretense of fidelity.
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