We followed the stony path at the bottom of the ravine which leads to
Les Charmettes, still talking of this love. We were alone. The
goat-herds even had forsaken the dried-up pastures and the leafless
hedges. The sun shone now and then between the passing clouds, and its
concentrated rays were warmer within the sheltered sides of the ravine.
The redbreasts hopped about the bushes almost within our reach. Every
now and then we would sit on the southern bank of the road to read a
page or two of the "Confessions," and identify ourselves with the
place.
We fancied we saw the young vagrant in his tattered clothes, knocking
at the gate and delivering, with a blush, his letter of recommendation
to the fair recluse, in the lonely path that leads from the house to
the church. 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. 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. Her lovely face beams forth from the dust-covered
and dingy canvas with beauty, sportiveness, and pensive grace. Poor
charming woman! Had she not met that wandering boy on the highway; had
she not opened to him her house and heart, his sensitive and suffering
genius might have been extinguished in the mire. The meeting seemed
like the effect of chance, but it was predestination meeting the great
man under the form of his first love. That woman saved him; she
cultivated him; she excited him in solitude, in liberty, and in love,
as the houris of the East through pleasure raise up martyrs in their
young votaries. She gave him his dreamy imagination, his almost
feminine soul, his tender accents, his passion for nature. Her pensive
fancy imparted to him enthusiasm,--the enthusiasm of women, of young
men, of lovers, of all the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy of his day.
She gave him the world, and he proved ungrateful.... She gave him fame,
and he bequeathed opprobrium.... But posterity should be grateful to
them, and forgive a weakness that gave us the prophet of liberty. When
Rousseau wrote those odious pages against his benefactress, he was no
longer Rousseau, he was a poor madman. Who knows if his morbid and
disordered imagination, which made him at that time see an insult in
every benefit and hatred in all friendship, did not show him likewise
the courtesan in the loving woman, and wantonness instead of love? I
have always suspected it. I defy any rational man to recompose, with a
semblance of probability, the character Rousseau gives to the woman he
loved, from the contradictory elements which he describes in her. Those
elements exclude each other: if she had soul enough to adore Rousseau,
she did not at the same time love Claude Anet; if she grieved for
Claude Anet and Rousseau, she did not love the young hair-dresser. If
she was pious she did not glory in her weakness, but must have deplored
it; if engaging, handsome, and frail, as Rousseau depicts her, she
could not be reduced to look for admirers among the vagrants of the
streets, or on the highways. If she affected devotion with such a life,
she was a calculating hypocrite; and if a hypocrite, she was not the
frank, open, and unreserved creature of the "Confessions." The likeness
cannot be true; it is a fancy head and a fancy heart. There is some
hidden mystery here, which must be attributed rather to the misguided
hand of the artist than to the nature of the woman whom he wished to
represent. We must neither accuse the painter whose discernment was at
that time impaired, nor believe in the portrait which has disfigured
the sketch he at first made of an adorable creature.
For my part I never could believe that Madame de Warens would have
recognized herself in the questionable pages of Rousseau's old age. In
my fancy, I have always restored her to what she was, or what she
appeared at Annecy to the young poet,--lovely, feeling, tender, frail
though really pious, prodigal of kindness, thirsting after love, and
desirous of blending the tender names of mother and of mistress in her
affection for the youth that Providence had confided to her, and whom
her love had adopted. This is the true portrait, such as the old men of
Chambéry and Annecy have told me that their fathers had transmitted to
them. Rousseau's mind itself bears witness against his own accusations.
Whence would he have derived his sublime and tender piety, his feminine
melancholy, his exquisite and delicate touches of feeling, if a woman
had not bestowed them with her heart. No, the woman who called into
existence such a man was not a cynical courtesan, but rather a fallen
Héloise--an Héloise fallen by love and not by vice or depravity. I
appeal from Rousseau the morose old man, calumniating human nature, to
Rousseau, the young and ardent lover; and when I go, as I often do, to
muse at Les Charmettes, I seek a Madame de Warens far more touching and
attractive in my imagination than in his.