d,
therefore, Madam de Menthon's daughter's singing-master, and nothing
more! but I lived happily, and was ever well received at Chambery, which
was a thousand times more desirable than passing for a wit with her, and
for a serpent with everybody else.

However this might be, Madam de Warrens conceived it necessary to guard
me from the perils of youth by treating me as a man: this she immediately
set about, but in the most extraordinary manner that any woman, in
similar circumstances, ever devised. I all at once observed that her
manner was graver, and her discourse more moral than usual. To the
playful gayety with which she used to intermingle her instructions
suddenly succeeded an uniformity of manner, neither familiar nor severe,
but which seemed to prepare me for some explanation. After having vainly
racked my brain for the reason of this change, I mentioned it to her;
this she had expected and immediately proposed a walk to our garden the
next day. Accordingly we went there the next morning; she had contrived
that we should remain alone the whole day, which she employed in
preparing me for those favors she meant to bestow; not as another woman
would have done, by toying and folly, but by discourses full of sentiment
and reason, rather tending to instruct than seduce, and which spoke more
to my heart than to my senses. Meantime, however excellent and to the
purpose these discourses might be, and though far enough from coldness or
melancholy, I did not listen to them with all the attention they merited,
nor fix them in my memory as I should have done at any other time. That
air of preparation which she had adopted gave me a degree of inquietude;
while she spoke (in spite of myself) I was thoughtful and absent,
attending less to what she said than curious to know what she aimed at;
and no sooner had I comprehended her design (which I could not easily do)
than the novelty of the idea, which, during all the years I had passed
with her, had never once entered my imagination, took such entire
possession of me that I was no longer capable of minding what she said!
I only thought of her; I heard her no longer.

Thinking to render young minds attentive to reason by proposing some
highly interesting object as the result of it, is an error instructors
frequently run into, and one which I have not avoided in my Umilius.
The young pupil, struck with the object presented to him, is occupied
only with that, and leaping lig