These excellent pamphlets brought Tissot fame and the friendship of the great. Joseph II. offered him a medical chair at the University of Padua, which he occupied for two years. He was offered, but did not accept, the posts of physician at the Courts of Hanover and Poland. The Prince of Wurtemberg--he whom Rousseau addressed in the famous letter beginning 'If I had had the misfortune to be born a Prince'--settled at Lausanne in order to be near him; and many interesting people sought his advice by correspondence. In particular a certain young gunner wrote from Ajaccio to ask what his uncle, an Archdeacon, had better take for the gout. The orthography is curious: 'S'il asseie de remuer les genoux, des douleurs égus lui font cesser son accion.' The signature is 'BUONAPARTE, _Officier au régiment de la Fère_.' [Illustration: LAUSANNE FROM THE SIGNAL] FOOTNOTE: [4] She sheltered Madame de Genlis in her flight from the Revolution. CHAPTER V BENJAMIN CONSTANT AND MADAME DE STAËL Next, though they do not become interesting until a somewhat later date, we may mention the Constants: Rosalie de Constant, the witty little hunchback whose sentimental correspondence with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre has recently been published, and her more famous cousin, Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, the story of whose love for Madame de Staël has recently been revived.[5] That is another story which will be here in its proper place. Benjamin was a man of many love-affairs; 'Constant the inconstant' was the name that women called him by. He was the son of a Swiss soldier of fortune, and had a cosmopolitan education at Oxford and Edinburgh, in Belgium and in Germany. In his youth he held the post of Chamberlain at the Court of Brunswick, where he acquired distingished manners. He was brilliant, though shallow, and there was something Wertheresque about him. Born in 1767, he was married, in 1789, to the ugliest of the Duchess of Brunswick's maids of honour. He said afterwards that he had married her for no particular reason that he could remember, but that his reasons for divorcing her were clear enough. After his separation from her, he consoled himself by an intrigue with Madame de Charrière--a Dutch lady, married to a Switzer, residing at Colombier, near Neuchâtel, and known as the authoress of several sentimental novels. It was an affair that could hardly have lasted long in any case, seeing that the lady was twenty-seven years older than her lover. As a matter of fact it came to a quick end when the lover met Madame de Staël.