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To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor soul like Madame de Warens is as if one should denounce flagrant want of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and confusion.
"Oh! he asked him his name, and Tom, whose head Mrs. 'De Warens! cried Sir John, amazed, 'we'll have no De's here: take him to Bridewell! and so, Mrs. Copperas, being without a foot-boy, sent for me, and I supplied her with Bob!" "Out of the late Lady Waddilove's wardrobe too?" said Clarence. "Ha, ha! that's well, very well, sir. No, not exactly; but he was a son of her late ladyship's coachman.
"Alas!" she answered, "you will not believe me, but I was thinking, that I could wish to be Madame de Warens for you, during one single season, even though I were to be forsaken for the remainder of my days, and though shame were to attach to my memory like hers; even though you proved yourself as ungrateful and calumniating as Rousseau!.... How happy she was," she continued, gazing up at the sky as though she sought the image of the strange creature she envied, "how happy she was! she sacrificed herself for him she loved."
We were destined to carry away our love from thence as pure and as divine as we had brought it there within us. "Oh," I inwardly exclaimed, "were I a Rousseau, what might not this other Madame de Warens have made me; she who is as superior to her of Les Charmettes as I am inferior to Rousseau, not in feeling, but in genius."
Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madame de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease.
He asked questions of priests all day long, because he was filled with the fallacy that priests knew the secrets of the unknowable and were on friendly terms with God. To escape importunity a priest sent him to Madame De Warens. Now Madame was a widow, rich and volatile, filled with a holy religious zeal.
Who has not seen on reading the Confessions of Jean-Jacques, that Madame de Warens is described as much prettier than she ever was in actual life?
Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in him, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over gardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. "It was the first time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows.
Caldwell, and came often to the house; and finally he began to teach Beth Latin at her own request, and with the consent of her mother. The lessons had not gone on very long, however, before he tried to insinuate into his teaching some of the kind of sophistries which another tutor had imposed by way of moral philosophy on Rousseau's Madame de Warens in her girlhood, to her undoing.
Copperas; 'then, now, having swallowed in the roll, I will e'en roll in the swallow! 'Ha! ha! ha! sir, very facetious, was it not?" "Very, indeed," said Clarence; "and so Mr. de Warens has gone; how came that?"
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