argument on his side, that I should have blushed to oppose so capital a host."[25] So it was agreed that he should be put in a way to be further instructed of these matters.  We may accept Rousseau’s assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid complaisance.  He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices to which he resorted, might have thought him very false.  But, he argues, “flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is oftener a virtue, especially in the young.  The kindness with which a man receives us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that we give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for good.”  He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like the coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends, without permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow some austere reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to believe; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his worldly interests.  All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain of remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to impress us.  We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months back.  This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary element of a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthy consciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something, though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading.

The die was cast.  M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and counted zealous for the cause of the Church.  In an interview whose minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21, 1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage, whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown.  He expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant of days in good works.  Instead of this, there turned round upon him a person not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing air, a fascinating smile, a tender eye.  Madame de Warens read the letters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully.  It was decided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to a monastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the true Church.  At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faith and the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem of shelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise.  Elated with vanity at the