The love passages excited me, and what rendered them more precious and more seductive to me was the writers lovely way of praising at once the peace of the country and the happiness of bucolic life. In the peace that environed me I felt more plainly the movements of my own heart. I was at the feet of Mme Basile _without daring so much as to touch her dress. A slight movement of her finger,--hand lightly pressed against my lips, were the only favours I ever received from her, and the memory of these slight favours transports me as I think of them_. I would try to represent to myself the gentle air of those fair women whom no heart could resist, and--shall I be believed?--I found a personal application in a lament which touched my hardly completed and already disquieted eighteen years. _Tormented with the desire to love without ever finding its satisfaction, I saw myself drawing nigh to the gates of old age and dying without having lived_. When I climbed high enough to see the lake, far away at the foot of the hills, I would repeat the simple aspiration, _All I desire is a sure friend, a loving wife, a cow and a little boat_, and my growing exaltation of sentiment seemed endowed with innocence. I could have wept for love while eating strawberries smothered in sweet cream. Thus the period through which I was passing was very closely linked with that of my convalescence, of which it became in a sort the completion. Alone by myself I resumed the walks which a few years before I had taken with grandfather. His friend Jean-Jacques was with me in his stead. These were not the same places, but in natural aspects there was small difference between them. They had the same glamour of wildness, that flutter of vegetation stirred by the slightest breath, the sparkle of waters; and the greater altitude even added a more exhilarating air, farther distances, less accessible to the works of man, a new exaltation. In the mountains the holdings are without walls or gates. No enclosure mars the beauty of the land, and individual ownership is not apparent,--that ownership which, as I knew from grandfather’s teachings, corrupts the heart of man and fills it with greed, jealousy and cupidity. On the mountains field and forest belong to every one and to no one, like the sun and the air, like health. The upper pastures, whither the shepherd who in one sentence had revealed longing to me, was leading his sheep,--now I was treading their short grass. Mountain climbing thrilled me with an ardour for conquest, and with each height gained I hoped to meet her whom I was awaiting but who continually evaded me. She was not Nazzarena, whom I had loved and whom now my dreams disdained; who seemed to me too young, too simple. I thought rather of the unknown lady of the pavilion, or still more of her who had appeared before me on the road, all in white with a hat trimmed with cherries, and a flower-like face, she whose parasol made