150 ROUSSEAU. 



ject he set out, and with his warm attachment for his 

 new acquaintance ; but as he came near Annecy, and 

 once more hoped to be received into Madame de 

 Warens' house, he felt he could not take Bacler 

 with him, and so he began to affect a great coldness, 

 that he might shake him off. This he soon contrived 

 to do, and he was kindly taken into her hospitable 

 family, where he became domesticated. 



By the account of her, which exposes all her failings 

 with great minuteness, as a reward for her undeviating 

 kindness towards him, Madame de Warens appears to 

 have been a woman of some accomplishments, of con- 

 siderable personal charms, of attractive manners, of a 

 most kind and charitable disposition, and of very loose 

 principles. This latter particular he endeavours to 

 gloss over by insisting on her peculiar notions of what 

 was fit and allowable. One of her peculiarities was to 

 make herself uniformly the mistress of all her men 

 servants, beside having occasionally deviations into a 

 superior rank of life. To be sure, he maintains that 

 she only adopted this course as the means of attaching 

 these domestics the more to her service ; and he holds it 

 quite clear that she neither sought nor found any gra- 

 tification whatever in this odd kind of family inter- 

 course. Nevertheless he records that his own succes- 

 sor was a tall, ignorant, ill-bred young man of the 

 lowest rank, a hairdresser's apprentice, who domineered 

 over the household, maltreated her shamefully, and 

 brought her to ruin by his extravagance. Her con- 

 stant and most delicate kindness to Rousseau himself 

 was repaid by much ingratitude, of which the worst 

 part is his committing to paper every detail of his con- 



