decided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to a
monastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the true
Church. At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faith
and the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem of
shelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elated
with vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades the
great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom he
had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which he
was about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in all
possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement which
hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemed
the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined
rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams,
bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade,
voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a
charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward
without knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval
as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life.
It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive
sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy.

The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth
found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary
monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who
pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and
Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being
supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly
forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion
was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the
parties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into the