Rousseau was
wrecked there by the first storms of his fate, and was rescued by a
woman, young, lovely, and adventurous, wrecked and lost like himself.
This woman seems to have been a compound of virtues and weaknesses,
sensibility and license, piety and independence of thought, formed
expressly by Nature to cherish and develop the strange youth, whose
mind comprehended that of a sage, a lover, a philosopher, a legislator,
and a madman. Another woman might perhaps have produced another life.
In a man we can always trace the woman whom he first loved. Happy would
he have been who had met Madame de Warens before her profanation! She
was an idol to be adored, but the idol had been polluted. She herself
debased the worship that a young and loving heart tendered her. The
amours of this woman and Rousseau appear like a leaf torn from the
loves of Daphnis and Chloe, and found soiled and defiled on the bed of
a courtesan. It' matters not; it was the first love, or the first
delirium, if you will, of the young man. The birthplace of that love,
the arbor where Rousseau made his first avowal, the room where he
blushed at his first emotions, the yard where he gloried in the most
humble offices to serve his beloved protectress, the spreading
chestnut-trees beneath which they sat together to speak of God, and
intermingled their sportive theology with bursts of merriment and
childish caresses, the landscape, mysterious and wild as they, which
seems so well adapted to them,--have all, for the lover, the poet, or
the philosopher, a deep and hidden attraction.
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