One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to his new post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the felucca, or passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may notice in passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of the fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left the least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and thought of it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the want of space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself. "I manufactured," he says, "a good bed out of my coats and shirts, sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out of my old cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a table of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, and arranged some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I made myself so comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows, I was nearly as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my lodgings in Paris. My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers, with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my dining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat, and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew, to warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was neither writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk in the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out on to the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out. I passed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole three weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness."[115]