What then did I do? My reader has already guessed, if he has paid the least attention to my progress so far. The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart. Never was this resource more opportune, and never did it prove more fertile. In my continual ecstasies I intoxicated myself with draughts of the most exquisite sentiments that have ever entered the heart of a man. Altogether ignoring the human race, I created for myself societies of perfect creatures celestial in their virtue and in their beauty, and of reliable, tender, and faithful friends such as I had never found here below. I took such pleasure in thus soaring into the empyrean in the midst of all the charms that surrounded me, that I spent countless hours and days at it, losing all memory of anything else. No sooner had I eaten a hasty morsel than I was impatient to escape and run into my woods once more. When I was about to set out for my enchanted world and saw wretched mortals appearing to hold me down to earth, I could neither restrain nor conceal my annoyance. Indeed I lost control of myself and gave them so rude a reception that it might almost have been called brutal. This merely increased my reputation for misanthropy, whereas it would have gained me quite a contrary one if people had been more able to read my heart.
At the supreme height of my exaltation I was suddenly pulled down, like a kite on a string, and restored to my place by Nature by the agency of a fairly sharp attack of my complaint. I used the only remedy which afforded me any relief, the catheters, and they put a stop to my celestial amours. For not only is one seldom in love when in pain, but my imagination, which only thrives in the country and under trees, languishes and dies in a room beneath the rafters of a ceiling. I have often regretted that dryads do not exist; for among them I should assuredly have found an object for my love.
Other domestic upsets came simultaneously to increase my annoyances. Mme Le Vasseur paid me the prettiest compliments in the world, but alienated her daughter from me in every way she could. I received letters from my old neighbourhood informing me that the good old woman had behind my back incurred several debts in Thérèse’s name. Thérèse had known this, but she had not told me of it. The payment of the debts annoyed me much less than the secret that had been made of them. How could a woman from whom I had never keep a secret keep one from me? Can one hide things from the person one loves? The Holbach circle, who saw that I never came to Paris, began to be positively afraid that I enjoyed the country and might be fool enough to stay there. Then began those intrigues, the object of which was to get me back to the city by indirect means. Diderot, who did not want to show his own hand so soon, began by detaching Deleyre from me, whom I had just introduced to him. Deleyre received and handed on to me such thoughts as Diderot chose to impart to him, without perceiving the real purpose of it all.
Everything seemed to combine to arouse me from my sweet and foolish reverie. I had not recovered from my attack when I received a copy of the poem on the destruction of Lisbon which I supposed to have been sent me by the author. This put me under the obligation of writing to him and speaking of his play, which I did in a letter that was printed a long time afterwards, without my consent, as will be told hereafter.
Struck by seeing that poor man, weighed down, so to speak, by fame and prosperity, bitterly complaining, nevertheless, against the wretchedness of this life and finding everything invariably bad, I formed the insane plan of bringing him back to himself and proving to him that all was well. Though Voltaire has always appeared to believe in God, he has really only believed in the Devil, because his so-called God is nothing but a malicious being who, according to his belief, only takes pleasure in doing harm. The absurdity of this doctrine leaps to the eye, and it is particularly revolting in a man loaded with every kind of blessing who, living in the lap of luxury, seeks to disillusion his fellow-men by a frightening and cruel picture of all the calamities from which he is himself exempt. I who had a better right to count up and weigh the evils of human life, examined them impartially and proved to him that there was not one of all those evils that could be blamed on Providence, not one that has not its source rather in the misuse that man has made of his faculties than in Nature herself. I treated him in that letter with all the deference, consideration, and circumspection possible, indeed I think with the utmost respect. However, since I knew that his vanity was most easily offended, I did not send it straight to him but to Doctor Tronchin, his physician and friend, giving him full authority to pass it on or destroy it, whichever should seem to him the better course. Tronchin gave him the letter, and Voltaire replied to me in a few lines that, being both an invalid and a sick-nurse himself, he would postpone his answer till another time. He did not say a word on the subject I had raised. Tronchin, in forwarding this note to me, added one of his own in which he expressed scant respect for the man who had passed it to him.
I have never published or even shown these two letters, since I have no desire to parade little triumphs of this kind; but the originals of these are in my collection (Packet A, Nos. 20 and 21). In the meantime Voltaire has published the reply that he promised me. It is nothing less than his novel Candide, of which I cannot speak because I have not read it.
All these distractions should have worked a radical cure for my fantastic amours, and this was perhaps a means offered me by Heaven for preventing their fatal consequences. But my unlucky star prevailed, and no sooner did I begin to recover than my heart, my head and my feet resumed the same paths. I say the same, but only in certain respects; for my ideas were a little less exalted and this time remained upon earth. But they made so exquisite a choice among all the charming things of every kind that could be found there that it was not much less chimerical than the chimerical world I had deserted. I imagined love and friendship, the two idols of my heart, in the most ravishing of forms, and took delight in adorning them with all the charms of the sex I had always adored. I imagined two women friends, rather than two of my own sex, since although examples of such friendships are rarer they are also more beautiful. I endowed them with analogous but different characters; with features if not perfect yet to my taste, and radiant with kindliness and sensibility. I made one dark, the other fair; one lively, the other gentle; one sensible, the other weak, but so touching in her weakness that virtue itself seemed to gain by it. I gave one of them a lover to whom the other was a tender friend and even something more; but I allowed of no rivalry or quarrels or jealousy because I find it hard to imagine any painful feelings, and I did not wish to discolour my charming picture with anything degrading to Nature. Being captivated by my two charming models, I identified myself as far as I could with the lover and friend. But I made him young and pleasant, whilst endowing him also with the virtues and faults that I felt in myself.
In order to place my characters in a suitable setting, I passed the loveliest places I had seen in my travels one after another in review. But I found no woodland fresh enough, no countryside moving enough to suit me. The valleys of Thessaly would have satisfied me, if I had seen them; but my imagination was tired of inventing, and wanted some real locality to serve as a basis, and to create for the inhabitants I intended to place there the illusion of real existence. I thought for some time of the Borromean Islands, the delicious sight of which had enraptured me; but I found too much ornament and artifice about them for my inhabitants. I needed a lake, however, and finally I chose that lake around which my heart has never ceased to wander. I fixed on that part of its shores, which my wishes long ago chose as my dwelling-place in that imaginary state of bliss which is all that fate has allowed me. My poor Mamma’s birthplace had still a special attraction for me. Its contrasting features, the richness and variety of its landscape, the magnificence and majesty of the whole, which charms the senses, moves the heart, and elevates the soul, finally determined me, and I established my young pupils at Vevey. That is as much
as I imagined at the first inspiration; the rest was only added subsequently.
I confined myself for a long time to so vague a plan because it was sufficient to fill my imagination with pleasant objects, and my heart with those feelings on which it loves to feed. This fiction, by constant repetition, finally assumed greater consistency and took a fixed and definite shape in my brain. It was then that the whim seized me to set down on paper some of the situations that it suggested to me and, by recalling all that I had felt in my youth, to give some sort of expression to my desire to love which I had never been able to satisfy, and which I now felt was devouring me.
At first I jotted down a few scattered letters, unrelated to one another and in no sequence; and when I made up my mind to connect them I was often in considerable trouble. What is almost incredible but is nevertheless a fact is that the first two parts were written almost entirely in this manner, without my having any well-formed plan or even foreseeing that one day I should be tempted to make a regular work of it. Thus it can be seen these two parts, made up after the event of material which was not shaped for the position it occupies, are full of verbal padding, which is not to be found in the other parts.
At the height of my reveries I received a visit from Mme d’Houdetot, the first she had made me in all her life, but unfortunately not the last, as will be seen hereafter. The Countess d’Houdetot was the daughter of the late M. de Bellegarde, a farmer-general, and sister of M. d’Épinay, of M. de Lalive, and of M. de La Briche, who have since both been made ambassadorial attachés.* I have spoken of my acquaintance with her when she was a girl. Since her marriage I had only seen her at the parties at La Chevrette and at her sister-in-law’s, Mme d’Épinay. Having often spent several days in her company, at La Chevrette or at Épinay, not only did I always find her very pleasant, but she seemed also well disposed towards me. She was rather fond of taking walks with me; we were both walkers, and conversation did not flag between us. However, I never went to call on her in Paris, although she asked me and even pressed me to do so on several occasions. Her intimacy with M. de Saint-Lambert, with whom I was beginning to be on close terms, made her still more interesting to me; and it was to bring me news of that friend, who was, I think, at Mahon at the time, that she came to see me at the Hermitage.
This visit had somewhat the appearance of the beginning of a romance. She lost her way. Her coachman left the road at a bend and tried to drive straight across from the mill at Clairvaux to the Hermitage. Her carriage stuck in the mud at the bottom of the valley, and she decided to get out and go the rest of the way on foot. Her thin shoes were soon wet through, she sank in the mire, and her servants had infinite trouble in getting her out. Finally, she arrived at the Hermitage in a pair of boots, making the air ring with her laughter in which I joined when I saw her coming. She had to change all her clothes; Thérèse provided clean ones, and I persuaded her to forget her dignity and join us in a country meal, which she very much enjoyed. It was late and she did not stay long; but our meeting was so gay that she was quite delighted and seemed inclined to come again. She did not carry out her intention, however, till the next year. But, alas, this delay did nothing to save me.
I spent the autumn in an occupation that no one would expect, protecting M. d’Épinay’s fruit. The Hermitage was the reservoir for the park waters of La Chevrette, and it had a walled garden planted with espaliers and other trees, which provided M. d’Épinay with more fruit than his La Chevrette kitchen-garden, even though three-quarters of it was stolen. So as not to be an absolutely useless guest, I undertook the management of the garden and the supervision of the gardeners. All went well until the fruit season; but as it grew ripe I saw that it disappeared, a fact that I could not account for. The gardener assured me that it was the dormice that were eating it all. I waged war against the dormice and destroyed many of them, but the fruit went on disappearing all the same. So carefully did I watch that in the end I discovered the gardener himself to be the chief dormouse. He lodged at Montmorency, but came over every night with his wife and children to pick up the stored fruit he had laid up during the day, and put them up for public sale in the Paris market just as if he had possessed a garden of his own. This wretch, whom I had loaded with kindnesses, whose children Thérèse used to clothe, and whose father, who was a beggar, I almost supported, stole from us with equal ease and effrontery, none of the three of us being vigilant enough to put a stop to it, and in a single night he succeeded in emptying my cellar, which I found entirely pillaged next morning. So long as he seemed to be reserving his attentions for me, I put up with it all, but as I wished to account for the fruit I had to denounce the thief. Mme d’Épinay asked me to pay him and discharge him, and look for another gardener; which is what I did. As that great rogue prowled round the Hermitage every night, armed with a huge iron-tipped stick that looked like a club, and followed by other vagabonds of his own kind, in order to reassure the bosses, who were frightened of this terrible man, I made his successor sleep every night at the Hermitage. But as they were still not easy in their minds, I sent to Mme d’Épinay for a gun which I put in the gardener’s room, instructing him only to employ it at need if anyone tried to force the door or climb into the garden, and only to use a powder charge, solely in order to frighten the thieves. This was surely the least precaution a man in poor health could have taken for the common good, when he had to spend the winter deep in the woods, alone with two nervous women. Lastly, I acquired a little dog to act as a sentinel.
I told my story to Deleyre, who came to see me during this time, and laughed with him over my military preparations. On his return to Paris he tried to amuse Diderot by passing the tale on to him; and that is how the Holbach circle learnt that I seriously meant to spend the winter at the Hermitage. This determination, which they could never have imagined, quite threw them out; and in the meantime, until they could invent some fresh intrigue to make my life there unpleasant,* they alienated this same Deleyre from me, through Diderot’s agency. For Deleyre, having first of all found my precautions quite understandable, ended by finding them inconsistent with my principles and worse than ridiculous. He wrote me some letters in which he described them as such, and poured sarcastic jokes upon me, biting enough to offend me if I had been in a mood to take offence. But being at that time bathed in affectionate and tender emotions and susceptible to no others I saw nothing in his bitter sarcasms but attempts at fun, and found him merely jocose when anyone else would have thought him crazy. So on this occasion the men who prompted him wasted their energies, and I spent my winter undisturbed.
By dint of care and vigilance I succeeded in protecting the garden so well that although the crop almost failed that season the yield was three times as great as in the previous year. Certainly I spared no pains to safeguard it. I went so far as to accompany the consignments which I sent to La Chevrette and Épinay, and even to carry some baskets myself. I remember that Thérèse and I carried one so heavy that, to save ourselves from collapsing under its weight, we had to rest every ten steps, and arrived bathed in sweat.
1757 When bad weather began to confine me to my house, I tried to resume my indoor occupations; I found it impossible. I saw nothing anywhere but the two charming girl friends, their man, their surroundings, and the country they lived in, nothing but objects created or embellished for them by my imagination. I was no longer master of myself even for a moment, the delirium never left me. After many vain efforts to banish all these fictions from my mind I was in the end altogether seduced by them, and my only occupation was to try and impose some order and sequence upon them, to turn them into a sort of novel.
My chief embarrassment was shame at so fully and openly going back on myself. After the strict principles that I had just proclaimed with so much noise, after the austere rules that I had so loudly preached, after so much stinging invective against effeminate books which breathed of love and languor, could anything more unexpected or more shocking be imagined than that I should suddenly
with my own hand enrol myself among the authors of these books I had so violently censured? I felt my inconsistency in all its force, I reproached myself for it, I blushed for it, I was angry with myself. But all this was insufficient to bring me back to reason. Being completely captivated, I was forced to submit, whatever the risk might be, and to make up my mind to brave the world’s opinion, though subject to the consideration that I could decide later whether to show my work or not, for I did not yet suppose that I should go so far as to publish it.
Having taken my resolution, I plunged whole-heartedly into my reveries and, by turning them over and over in my head, finally sketched a kind of plan, the fulfilment of which is now known. This was certainly the best use I could have put my follies to. The love of virtue, which has never left my heart, turned them to purposes at once useful and potentially beneficial to morality. My voluptuous imaginings would have lost all their grace if they had lacked the gentle colours of innocence. A weak girl is an object of pity, on whom love may confer some appeal, and who is often none the less lovable for her weakness. But who can bear the sight of fashionable manners without indignation? What is there more revolting than the pride of an unfaithful wife who openly treads all her duties underfoot and expects her husband to be deeply grateful for the favour when she is so kind as to see that she is not caught in the act? There are no perfect beings to be found in Nature. Their examples are too remote from our world. But that a young person, born with a heart both honest and tender, should allow herself to be conquered by love before marriage, and should gather sufficient strength, when a wife, to turn the tables and regain her virtue, should anyone tell you that this picture is utterly scandalous and serves no useful purpose, he is a liar and a hypocrite. Do not listen to him.
The Confessions Page 52