I soon had as many pupils as I needed, and the constant intercourse with these ladies was very pleasant to me.  But from the stories which I carried home of our interviews the little mother apprehended dangers of which I was not at that time conscious.  The course which she took was a singular one.  She had rented a little garden outside the town, and here she invited me to spend the day with her.  Thither we went, and from the drift of her conversation, which was full of good sense and kindliest warnings, I gradually perceived the degree of her goodness towards me.  The compact involved conditions, and my answer was to be given on that day week.

Thus was established among the three of us a society to which there is perhaps no parallel.  All our wishes, our cares, our interests were in common.  If one of us was missing from the dinner-table, or a fourth was present, all seemed out of order.  But our little circle was broken all too soon.  Claude Anet, on a botanical excursion, fell a victim to pleurisy, and died, notwithstanding all her care.  He had been a most watchful economist of her pension and a restraint on her enterprises, and his loss was felt not only in our diminished party, but also in the wasting of her resources.  For the next three years these went from bad to worse.  Unfortunately, the life to which I had taken, of drifting from one interest to another—­now literature, now chess, now a journey, now music—­brought in nothing and cost a good deal; and to complete our anxieties, I fell ill nearly to death.  Her care and utter devotion saved me, and from that time our very existence was in common.

Les Charmettes

I was ordered to the country.  We found near Chamberi a little house, Les Charmettes, set in a garden among trees, as retired and solitary a home as if it had been a hundred miles from the town.  There we took up a new life towards the autumn of 1736; there began the brief happiness of my existence.  We were all in all to one another; together we roamed the country, worked in the garden, gathered fruit and flowers, lay under the trees and listened to the birds.  Golden hours, your memory is my only treasure!

Even a sudden illness, which affected my heart so that its pulse has from that time incessantly throbbed like a drum in my ears, and has made me a constant sufferer from insomnia, turned out to be a heavenly blessing.  Thinking myself a dead man, I only then began to live, and applied myself very eagerly to learning.  With my little mother as my teacher, I turned to the study of religion.  I sought books, and philosophy, the sciences, and Latin followed in their turn.  Nature, learning, leisure, and our ineffably sweet companionship—­I thought, poor fool, that these joys would be with me to the end.  It was otherwise decreed.