independence: I went from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to myself, ‘Here are no more roads or cities or monarchy or republic or presidents or kings or men.’ And in order to find out if I was restored to my original rights I did various wilful things that made my guide furious. In his heart he believed me mad.” The disillusion that followed is also one that the early pioneers would have had some difficulty in understanding. For he goes on to relate that while he was thus rejoicing in his escape from conventional life to pure nature he suddenly bumped up against a shed, and under the shed he saw his first savages--a score of them both men and women. A little Frenchman named M. Violet, “bepowdered and befrizzled, with an apple-green coat, drugget waistcoat and muslin frill and cuffs, was scraping on a pocket fiddle” and teaching the Indians to dance to the tune of Madelon Friquet. M. Violet, it seemed, had remained behind on the departure from New York of Rochambeau’s forces at the time of the American Revolution, and had set up as dancing-master among the savages. He was very proud of the nimbleness of his pupils and always referred to them as “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” “Was it not a crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau,” Chateaubriand concludes, “this introduction to savage life by a ball that the ex-scullion of General Rochambeau was giving to Iroquois? I felt very much like laughing, but I was at the same time cruelly humiliated.”