This is almost the only time when I have given in to my inclinations and not found myself deceived in my exceptions. The friendliness, the sociability and the easy-going temperament of the Savoyards made my relations with people most pleasant; and the liking I took for society at that time has been a clear proof to me that if 1 do not enjoy living among men it is less my fault than theirs.
It is a pity that the Savoyards are not rich, or perhaps it would be a pity if they were. For, as they are, they are the best and most sociable people I know. If there is one place in the world where one can enjoy the sweetness of life in agreeable and friendly society, it is the little town of Chambéry. The gentry of the province, who gather there, have only sufficient wealth to live on, not enough to advance themselves; and being unable to indulge in ambitions, they necessarily follow the counsel of Cineas. They devote their youth to military service, and then return to grow old peacefully at home. Honour and reason preside equally over this division. Their women are handsome, yet stand in no need of beauty; they have every quality that gives beauty a value, and may even supply its place. It is remarkable that though my profession brought me the sight of many young girls I do not remember having seen a single one at Chambéry who was not attractive. It may be thought that I was disposed to find them so, and there may be some truth in that. But I had no need to add anything of my own to the charm they possessed. Indeed I cannot remember my young pupils without pleasure. Why, as I mention the most charming of them here, can I not summon them back, and myself with them, to that happy age we enjoyed, when I would spend hours as innocent as they were sweet in their company! The first was Mlle de Mellarède, my neighbour and the sister of M. Gaime’s pupil. She was a most lively brunette, but tender in her liveliness, which was graceful and never hoydenish. She was rather thin, like most girls of her age, but her bright eyes, her slender figure, and her attractive manner had no need of plumpness in order to please. I went to her in the mornings, when she was still generally in déshabillé with no other headdress than her hair, which was carelessly pinned up and set off by some flowers that she placed there on my arrival and removed on my departure so that her hair might be dressed. I dread nothing so much in the world as a pretty girl in déshabillé; I should dread her a hundred times less in full dress. Mlle de Menthon, to whom I went in the afternoons, was always so, and she made quite as pleasant an impression on me, though a different one. Her hair was an ashen blonde. She was very slight, very shy, and very fair. Her voice was clear, well-pitched, and flute-like, but she had not the courage to use its full compass. She had a scar on her breast where she had scalded herself with boiling water, which was only partially hidden by a neckerchief of blue chenille. This mark sometimes called my attention in this direction, though soon it was no longer on account of the scar. Mlle de Challes, another of my neighbours, was fully developed. She was a tall girl, well made and rather plump, and had once been very pretty. Though no longer a beauty, she deserves mention for her gracious-ness, her equable temper, and her good nature. Her sister, Mme de Charly, the most beautiful woman in Chambéry, no longer learnt music, but I gave lessons to her daughter, who was still young but whose budding beauty might have promised to be the equal of her mother’s had she not, unfortunately, been a little carroty. At the Convent of the Visitation I had a little French girl whose name I have forgotten, but who deserves a place in my list of favourites. She had adopted the slow, drawling voice of the nuns, and in this drawling tone made some very clever remarks, that seemed quite out of keeping with her manner. Otherwise she was indolent, and usually could not be bothered to show her wits, a display of which was a favour she did not grant to everybody. It was only after a month or two of lessons and of laziness that she thought of this expedient for making me more punctual. For I have never been able to compel myself to keep good time. I enjoyed my lessons while I was giving them, but I did not like being obliged to go to them, nor being tied to time. In all matters constraint and compulsion are unbearable to me; they would make me dislike even pleasure. It is said that among the Mohammedans a man goes through the streets at dawn to command all husbands to do their duty by their wives. At that hour I should be a bad Turk.
I had several girl pupils too among the middle class, and one in particular who was the indirect cause of a change in my relations with Mamma, of which I must speak since, after all, I have to tell everything. She was a grocer’s daughter, Mlle Lard by name, the true model of a Greek statue, and whom I should quote as the most beautiful girl I have ever seen if real beauty could exist without life and without soul. Her indolence, her coldness, and her lack of feeling were quite incredible. It was equally impossible to please or to annoy her, and I am convinced that if any man had made an attempt on her virtue she would have let him have his way not out of inclination but out of stupidity. Her mother, who did not want to run the risk, never departed a step from her side. By making her learn singing and giving her a young master she was doing her best to rouse her; but that did not succeed. While the master provoked the daughter, the mother provoked the master, and that was hardly more successful. Mme Lard added to her natural vivacity all the skittishness her daughter should have possessed. She was a lively, pretty little woman with irregular features and marked with the smallpox. She had small, very burning eyes, which were rather red, because they were almost always sore. Every morning when I arrived, I found my coffee and cream ready; and the mother never failed to greet me with a kiss full on my lips, which I should have liked to return to the daughter out of curiosity, to see how she would take it. All this took place, however, so simply and so very casually that the provocation and the kissing were not interrupted even when M. Lard was present. He was a good-natured man, the true father of his daughter; and his wife did not deceive him, because there was no need to.
I submitted to all these caresses with my usual stupidity, taking them quite plainly as marks of true friendship. They did bother me, however, on occasions, for the lively Mme Lard was continuously exacting; and if in the course of the day I had passed the shop without looking in there would have been a row. When I was in a hurry I had to take a roundabout way and go down another street, for well I knew that it was easier to go in than to get away.
Mme Lard was too interested in me for me to be entirely uninterested in her. Her attentions touched me greatly, and I spoke of them to Mamma, as something quite straightforward. Even if I had felt some mystery about them, I should have told her of them just the same. For I should have found it impossible to keep anything secret from her; my heart was open before her as before God. She did not take the matter quite so simply as I did. She saw advances where I had only seen friendship. She considered that if Mme Lard had made it a point of honour to leave me less of a booby than she found me, she would succeed in one way or another in making herself understood. And not only was it not right that another woman should undertake the instruction of her pupil, but she had also worthier motives for protecting me from the snares to which my age and profession exposed me. At this same time another snare was laid for me of a more dangerous kind, which I escaped but which made her feel that the dangers continuously threatening me called for every measure of protection that she could employ.
The Countess of Menthon, the mother of one of my pupils, was a woman of considerable wit, and had the reputation of being no less malicious. She was said to have been the cause of several quarrels, among them one that had had consequences fatal to the house of Antremont. Mamma had been sufficiently intimate with her to know her character. Having quite innocently attracted a certain gentleman on whom Mme de Menthon had designs, she was guilty in that lady’s eyes of a heinous crime, although she had neither sought his preference nor accepted it; and from that time Mme de Menthon had attempted to do her rival several ill turns, none of which had succeeded. I will report one of the most comical by way of an example. They were together in the country with several gentlemen of the neighbourhood, among them the suitor in question, when Mme de Menthon re
marked one day to one of them that Mme de Warens was no more than a blue-stocking, that she had no taste, that she dressed badly and kept her bosom covered like a tradesman’s wife. ‘As for this last point,’ replied the man, who was a humorist, ‘she has, as I know, her reasons. There is a mark on her breast like an ugly great rat, so much so indeed that it almost seems to be moving.’ Hatred, like love, encourages credulity, and Mme de Menthon decided to make use of this discovery. So one day when Mamma was playing cards with that lady’s ungrateful favourite, Mme de Menthon took an opportunity of slipping behind her rival. Then, half overturning her chair, she neatly displaced her neckerchief. But instead of a great rat the gentleman saw something quite different, which it was easier to see than to forget; and that was not what the lady had intended.
I was not a person to interest Mme de Menthon, who wanted only brilliant company around her. However, she paid some attention to me, not for my looks, which certainly did not attract her in the least, but for the wit I was said to possess, which might have made me useful to her. She had rather a lively taste for satire, and was fond of making songs and verses about people whom she disliked. If she had found me clever enough to help her compose her verses and obliging enough to write them down, between the two of us we should soon have turned Chambéry upside down. Then the lampoons would have been traced to their source, Mme de Menthon would have extricated herself by sacrificing me, and I should perhaps have been imprisoned for the rest of my days, to teach me to play Apollo to the ladies.
Fortunately nothing of the sort took place. Mme de Menthon kept me to dinner two or three times in order to make me talk, and found that I was no better than a fool. I was conscious of this myself, and groaned, envying the talents of my friend Venture, whereas I should have been grateful to my stupidity for rescuing me from dangers. Henceforth for Mme de Menthon I was her daughter’s singing master and no more. But I lived on in peace and was always welcome in Chambéry, which was far better than being a wit in her eyes, and a serpent in everyone else’s.
However that may be, Mamma saw that to save me from the dangers of my youth it was time to treat me like a man, and this she did, but in the most singular fashion that ever occurred to a woman in like circumstances. I found her expression more serious and her conversation more moral than usual. The playful gaiety with which she usually interspersed her advice suddenly gave place to a sustained manner, neither familiar nor severe, which seemed preparatory to some explanation. After searching my mind in vain for the reason of this change, I asked her; and this was what she had been waiting for. She suggested a walk in the little garden for the next day; and early in the morning we were there. She had made arrangements for us to be left alone all that day, which she employed in preparing me for the favours she intended to grant me, not as any other woman would, by artifices and provocation, but by conversation full of feeling and good sense, better calculated to instruct me than to seduce me, and addressed to my heart rather than to my senses. But however excellent and to the purpose her speech to me may have been, and though it was very far from being cold or depressing, I did not give it all the attention it deserved, nor did I engrave it on my memory, as I should have done at any other time. The apparent preparation with which she began had disquieted me; and as she spoke, I could not help being dreamy and distracted, and less concerned with what she was saying than with speculations as to what she was leading up to. Once I had understood her meaning, and that I did not find easy, the novelty of the idea, which all the time I had been living with her had never once come into my head, so completely took hold of me that I was no longer capable of paying attention to what she said. I only thought of her, but did not listen to her.
To try and make young people attend to the lesson you wish to give them by dangling in front of their eyes the prospect of something very interesting to follow is a most common mistake in teachers, and one that I did not myself avoid in my Émile. The young person is so struck by the object held before him that he bothers about nothing else, and leaps lightly over your preliminary discourse to go straight to the point to which you are leading him too slowly for his liking. When you want his attention you must not allow yourself to run ahead, and that is where Mamma was clumsy. With a singularity characteristic of her very systematic mind, she took the utterly needless precaution of laying down her conditions. But once I saw the’ prize I did not even listen to them and hastily consented to everything. I doubt, though, whether in such a case any man whatsoever would be frank or courageous enough to bargain, or any woman in the world would pardon him if he ventured to do so. With the same singularity, she attached to the agreement the most solemn formalities, giving me eight days to consider it, which I hypocritically assured her I did not require. For, to crown the singularity of the affair, I was extremely glad of the respite, so bowled over was I by the novelty of these ideas, and so conscious of a revolution in mine which would need some time to compose.
It might be supposed that these eight days dragged for me like so many centuries. On the contrary, I could have wished them centuries long. I do not know how to describe the state I was in; it was made up of fright mingled with impatience. I dreaded what I desired, to the point of sometimes seriously searching my brains for some honourable excuse for evading my promised happiness. Imagine my ardent and lascivious temperament, my heated blood, my love-intoxicated heart, my vigour, my sound health, and my youth. Consider that in this condition, though thirsting for the love of woman, I had not yet approached one; that my imagination, need, vanity, curiosity, all combined to inflame me with the burning desire to be a man and prove myself one. Add, moreover – for this must not be forgotten – that my strong and tender affection, far from waning, had grown warmer with every day that passed; that I was only happy when beside her; that I only left her in order to think of her; that my heart was full not only of her kindnesses and her charming character, but of her sex, her form, her person; in a word, of herself, in every sense in which she was capable of being dear to me. And let it not be supposed that though ten or twelve years older than myself she had begun to age or seemed to me to have done so. In the five or six years since I had been so enraptured by the first sight of her she had really changed very little, and did not seem to me to have changed at all. For me she has always been charming, and then she was still so for everybody. Only her figure had become a little fuller. Otherwise it was the same eye, the same complexion, the same bosom, the same features, the same beautiful fair hair, the same gaiety, everything, even the same voice, that silvery voice of youth, which made so deep an impression on me that even to-day I cannot hear the sound of a pretty girlish voice without emotion.
What I had to fear whilst waiting to possess this beloved person was, naturally, the anticipation: the inability to control my desires and my imagination to a sufficient extent to remain master of myself. It will be seen that, in my latter age, the mere idea of some slight favours awaiting me from a woman I loved so heated my blood as to make it impossible for me to take the short journey to her side with impunity. How, by what miracle was it that in the flower of my youth I was so little eager for my first experience? How could I see the moment approaching with more pain than pleasure? How was it that instead of the delight which should have intoxicated me I felt almost repugnance and fear? There is not a doubt that if I could decently have avoided my happiness I should have done so with all my heart. I have promised some singularities in the history of my attachment for her; and here is certainly one feature that must be unexpected.
The reader, already disgusted, may consider that as she was already the mistress of another man, she degraded herself in my eyes by dividing her favours, and that a lowering of my respect for her cooled the passion she had inspired in me; he will be mistaken. This sharing, it is true, was very painful to me, as much on account of a very natural delicacy as because I thought it really unworthy of us both. But it did not in the least alter my feelings for her, and I can swear that I never loved her more tenderl
y than when I so little desired to possess her. I knew her chaste heart and her icy disposition too well to believe for a moment that the pleasure of the senses had any part in this surrender of herself. I was perfectly certain that only her anxiety to preserve me from dangers otherwise almost inevitable, and to preserve me entire for myself and my duties, forced her to infringe a law that she did not look upon with the same eyes as other women, as will be observed hereafter. I was sorry for her and for myself. I should have liked to say: ‘No, Mamma, it is not necessary. I can answer for myself without that.’ But I dared not, firstly because it was not a thing to say, and then because, fundamentally, I felt that it was untrue, and that really there was only one woman who could safeguard me from other women and put me out of reach of temptation. Without desiring to possess her, I was glad that she robbed me of any desire to possess other women. For I viewed anything that might distract my attention from her as a misfortune. The long habit of living with her on terms of innocence, far from weakening my feelings for her, had strengthened them, but at the same time it had given them a different turn, rendering them more affectionate, and more tender perhaps, but less sexual. By calling her Mamma and treating her with the familiarity of a son, I had grown to look on myself as such; and I think that is the real cause of my lack of eagerness to possess her, even though she was so dear to me. I remember very well then my first feelings for her, though no stronger, were more voluptuous. At Annecy, I was in a state of intoxication; at Chambéry, I had ceased to be. I still loved her with the utmost passion. But I loved her more for herself and less on my own account, or rather I sought happiness and not pleasure in her company. She was to me more than a sister, more than a mother, more than a friend, more even than a mistress; and that is why she was not a mistress to me. In short I loved her too much to desire her; that is the clearest idea I have on the subject.