[39] Lamartine in _Raphael_ defies "a reasonable man to recompose with
any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of
the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of
these elements excludes the other." It is worth while for any who care
for this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise
de Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of
the seventeenth century.

[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de
Bernex, printed in _Mélanges_, pp. 139-144.

[41] De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the
sexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of
religion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the
doctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the
gratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give food and
drink to the starving. Picot's _Hist. de Genève_, vol. ii.

[42] _Conf._, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.

[43] _Conf._, v. 345.

[44] _Conf._, ii. 83.

[45] _Ib._ ii. 82.

[46] _Ib._ iii. 179. See also 200.

[47] _Conf._, iii. 177, 178.