indefinite time to Paris. He never knew the secret of this sudden
departure, for no man, he says, was ever so little curious as to the
private affairs of his friends. His heart, completely occupied with the
present, filled its whole capacity and entire space with that, and
except for past pleasures no empty corner was ever left for what was
done with.[57] He says he was too young to take the desertion deeply to
heart. Where he found subsistence we do not know. He was fascinated by a
flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose company he wasted many hours, and
the precious stuff of youthful opportunity. He passed a summer day in
joyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again,
but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with him
remained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in
some of the traits of the new Heloïsa and her friend Claire.[59] Then he
accepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens
to attend her home to Freiburg. On this expedition he paid an hour's
visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon. Returning
from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that might
be taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook to
teach music. "I have already," he says, "noted some moments of
inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself. Behold me now a
teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air. Without the
least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all
the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I
gave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de
Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his
house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to
work to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I
knew all about it." The performance came off duly, and the strange
impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master.
Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted the