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. 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."
Absorbed in these thoughts, we walked up a shelving greensward upon
which a few walnut-trees were scattered here and there. These trees had
seen the lovers beneath their shade. To the right, where the pass
narrows so as to appear to form a barrier to the traveller, stands the
house of Madame de Warens on a high terrace of rough and ill-cemented
stones. It is a little square building of gray stone, with two windows
and a door opening on the terrace, and the same on the garden side;
there are three low rooms on the upper story, and a large room on the
ground floor with no other furniture than a portrait of Madame de
Warens in her youth.
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