give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for
good." He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like
the coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends,
without permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more
than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow some austere
reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his
friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all
dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to
believe; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man
to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his
worldly interests. All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain
of remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to
impress us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his
entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months back.
This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary element
of a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthy
consciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something,
though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading.

The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the
burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and
counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose
minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21,
1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage,
whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He
expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant
of days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a
person not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing
air, a fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the
letters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was