There were a few days more, but they were short and bitter, as the last dregs of a drained cup. We started for Chambery very early in the morning, not to show our pale cheeks and swollen eyelids in broad daylight, and passed the day there in a small inn of the Italian faubourg. The wooden galleries of the inn overlooked a garden with a stream running through it, and for a few hours we cheated ourselves into the belief that we were once more in our home at Aix, with its galleries, its silence, and its solitude. XLII. We wished before we left Chambéry and the valley we so much loved to visit together the humble dwelling of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Warens, at Les Charmettes. A landscape is but a man or a woman. What is Vaucluse without Petrarch? Sorrento without Tasso? What is Sicily without Theocritus, or the Paraclet without Heloise? What is Annecy without Madame de Warens? What is Chambéry without Jean Jacques Rousseau? A sky without rays, a voice without echo, a landscape without life! Man does not only animate his fellow-men, he animates all nature. He carries his own immortality with him into heaven, but bequeaths another to the spots that he has consecrated by his presence; it is only there we can trace his course, and really converse with his memory. We took with us the volume of the "Confessions" in which the poet of Les Charmettes describes this rustic retreat. Rousseau was wrecked there by the first storms of his fate, and was rescued by a woman, young, lovely, and adventurous, wrecked and lost like himself. This woman seems to have been a compound of virtues and weaknesses, sensibility and license, piety and independence of thought, formed expressly by Nature to cherish and develop the strange youth, whose mind comprehended that of a sage, a lover, a philosopher, a legislator, and a madman. Another woman might perhaps have produced another life. In a man we can always trace the woman whom he first loved. Happy would he have been who had met Madame de Warens before her profanation! She was an idol to be adored, but the idol had been polluted. She herself debased the worship that a young and loving heart tendered her. The amours of this woman and Rousseau appear like a leaf torn from the loves of Daphnis and Chloe, and found soiled and defiled on the bed of a courtesan. It' matters not; it was the first love, or the first delirium, if you will, of the young man. The birthplace of that love, the arbor where Rousseau made his first avowal, the room where he blushed at his first emotions, the yard where he gloried in the most humble offices to serve his beloved protectress, the spreading chestnut-trees beneath which they sat together to speak of God, and intermingled their sportive theology with bursts of merriment and childish caresses, the landscape, mysterious and wild as they, which seems so well adapted to them,--have all, for the lover, the poet, or the philosopher, a deep and hidden attraction.