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? What is Chambéry without Jean Jacques
Rousseau? A sky without rays, a voice without echo, a landscape without
life! Man does not only animate his fellow-men, he animates all nature.
He carries his own immortality with him into heaven, but bequeaths
another to the spots that he has consecrated by his presence; it is
only there we can trace his course, and really converse with his
memory. We took with us the volume of the "Confessions" in which the
poet of Les Charmettes describes this rustic retreat. 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. 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.