The next morning I was rolling along, sad and silent, wrapped in my
cloak, among the barren hills on the road that leads from Paris towards
the south. I was stowed away in a public coach, with five or six
unknown fellow-travellers who were gayly discussing the quality of the
wine and the price of the last dinner at the inn. I never once opened
my lips during that long, sad journey.
My mother received me with that serene and resigned tenderness which
might have made even misfortune happy in her company. Her diamond had
been spent in vain to advance my fortunes; and I returned home, with
shattered health and broken hopes, consumed with melancholy that she
attributed to my unoccupied youth and restless imagination, but of
which I carefully concealed the real cause, for fear of adding an
irremediable sorrow to all her other griefs.
I spent the summer alone in an almost deserted valley enclosed between
barren hills, where my father had a little farm, which was worked by a
poor family. My mother had sent me there, and commended me to the care
of these good people, that I might have a change of air and the benefit
of milk diet. My whole occupation was to reckon the days which must
intervene before I could join Julie in our dear Alpine valley. Her
letters, received and replied to daily, confirmed me in my security,
and dispelled, by their sportive gayety and caressing words, the gloomy
and sinister forebodings our last farewell had raised in my heart. Now
and then some desponding word or expression of sadness which seemed to
have unguardedly escaped, or been involuntarily overlooked among her
vistas of happiness, as a dry leaf in the midst of the foliage of
spring, struck me as being in contradiction with the calm and blooming
health she spoke of. But I attributed these discrepancies to some
vision of memory or to her impatience at the slowness of time which
might have flitted like shadows across the paper as she wrote.
The bracing mountain air, sleep at night, and exercise by day, the
healthy employment of working in the garden and in the farm, soon
restored me to health; but, above all, the approach of autumn, and the
certainty of soon seeing her once more who by her looks would give me
life. The only remaining trace of my sufferings was a gentle and
pensive melancholy which overspread my countenance; it was as the mist
of a summer's morning. My silence seemed to conceal some mystery, and
my instinctive love of solitude made the superstitious peasants of the
mountains believe that I conversed with the Genii of the woods.
All ambition had been extinguished in me by my love. I had made up my
mind for life to my hopeless poverty and obscurity, and my mother's
serene and pious resignation had entered into my heart with her holy
and gentle words. I only indulged the dream of working during ten or
eleven months of the year manually, or with my pen to earn sufficiently
thereby to spend a month or two with Julie every year. I thought that
if the old man's protection were one day to fail, I would devote myself
to her service as a slave, like Rousseau to Madame de Warens; we would
take shelter in some secluded cottage of these mountains, or in the
well-known chalets of our Savoy; I would live for her, as she would
live for me, without looking back with regret to the empty world, and
asking of love no other reward than the happiness of loving.