and meats at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly
swooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an
hour or so she took her first morsel.[46] On the whole, if we accept the
current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so
little flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient to
people with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and
cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or
rapacious vanity.

This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was
decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain
breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738.
It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He
acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it
was, and his principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the
poor and of the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was
revolutionised, and the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of
grandeur, of palaces, princesses, and a glorious career full in the
world's eye, were replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life,
which never afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a front
place in the imagination of literary Europe ever since. The notions or
aspirations which he had picked up from a few books gave way to notions
and aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the scenes of actual
life into which he was thrown, and which found his character soft for
their impression. In one way the new pictures of a future were as
dissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had been, and the
sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a man to
compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as the mental life
among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.