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In my first part I brought down my narrative to my departure with infinite regret from Paris, leaving my heart at Charmettes, and, there building my last castle in the air, intending some day to return to the feet of mamma, restored to herself, with the treasures I should have acquired, and depending upon my system of music as upon a certain fortune.
He was no anchorite proper, one weary of the world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one kind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he was now about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his inveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace a past.
They were so present to our fancy, that it seemed as though they were expecting us, and that we should see them at the window or in the garden walks of Les Charmettes. We would walk on, then stop again; the spot seemed to attract and to repel us by turns, as a place where love had been revealed, but where love had been profaned also. It presented no such perils to us.
Unfortunately, the life to which I had taken, of drifting from one interest to another now literature, now chess, now a journey, now music brought in nothing and cost a good deal; and to complete our anxieties, I fell ill nearly to death. Her care and utter devotion saved me, and from that time our very existence was in common. Les Charmettes I was ordered to the country.
It was Rousseau at Charmettes piling up the woodstack of Madame de Warens with the hand which was to write the Contrat Social, or Philopoemen chopping his wood. From the retirement of such secluded life, she sometimes perceived the higher world which shone above her. The lights which displayed to her this great world offended, more than they dazzled, her sight.
What rendered my situation yet more insupportable was the comparison I was continually drawing between the life I now led and that which I had quitted; the remembrance of my dear Charmettes, my garden, trees, fountain and orchard, but, above all, the company of her who was born to give life and soul to every other enjoyment.
We wished before we left Chambéry and the valley we so much loved to visit together the humble dwelling of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Warens, at Les Charmettes. A landscape is but a man or a woman. What is Vaucluse without Petrarch? Sorrento without Tasso? What is Sicily without Theocritus, or the Paraclet without Heloise? What is Annecy without Madame de Warens?
Rousseau appears not to have seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to the end, like a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet mysterious perfume of many-scented night in the silent garden at Charmettes. She died in a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease, misery, and neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heights above Chambéri.
They yield to it without knowing why. For poets this was the first page of that life which was a poem; for philosophers it was the cradle of a revolution; for lovers it is the birthplace of first love. We followed the stony path at the bottom of the ravine which leads to Les Charmettes, still talking of this love. We were alone.
'We left our strange but lovely place on the 18th, reaching Chambery at evening, stayed the next day there, walking, among other diversions to "Les Charmettes", the famous abode of Rousseau kept much as when he left it: I visited it with my wife perhaps twenty-five years ago, and played so much of "Rousseau's Dream" as could be effected on his antique harpsichord: this time I attempted the same feat, but only two notes or thereabouts out of the octave would answer the touch.
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