diminished party, but also in the
wasting of her resources. For the next three years these went from bad
to worse. Unfortunately, the life to which I had taken, of drifting from
one interest to another--now literature, now chess, now a journey, now
music--brought in nothing and cost a good deal; and to complete our
anxieties, I fell ill nearly to death. Her care and utter devotion saved
me, and from that time our very existence was in common.

_Les Charmettes_

I was ordered to the country. We found near Chamberi a little house, Les
Charmettes, set in a garden among trees, as retired and solitary a home
as if it had been a hundred miles from the town. There we took up a new
life towards the autumn of 1736; there began the brief happiness of my
existence. We were all in all to one another; together we roamed the
country, worked in the garden, gathered fruit and flowers, lay under the
trees and listened to the birds. Golden hours, your memory is my only
treasure!

Even a sudden illness, which affected my heart so that its pulse has
from that time incessantly throbbed like a drum in my ears, and has made
me a constant sufferer from insomnia, turned out to be a heavenly
blessing. Thinking myself a dead man, I only then began to live, and
applied myself very eagerly to learning. With my little mother as my
teacher, I turned to the study of religion. I sought books, and
philosophy, the sciences, and Latin followed in their turn. Nature,
learning, leisure, and our ineffably sweet companionship--I thought,
poor fool, that these joys would be with me to the end. It was otherwise
decreed.

My bodily condition has become pitiable, and it was determined that I
should go to Montpellier to consult a physician. I fell in, on the way
thither, with the Marquis de Torignan and his party, who were travelling
in the same direction. We struck up acquaintance, and I joined them,
taking an assumed name, and giving myself out for an Englishman.
Becoming intimate with a Madame de Larnage, who was among them, I
continued to travel with her day by day, after the others had reached
their destination. She was a woman of infinite charm. Mme. de Warens was
forgotten utterly, and I willingly agreed to settle down in her
vicinity, after fulfilling the purpose of my journey to Montpellier.
However, after two pleasurable months in that city, when I found myself
at the stage where the road divided--one road going to Mme. de Larnage,
the other to