This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738.  It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life.  He acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it was, and his principles of judging them.  He saw much of the lives of the poor and of the world’s ways with them.  Above all his ideal was revolutionised, and the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of grandeur, of palaces, princesses, and a glorious career full in the world’s eye, were replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life, which never afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a front place in the imagination of literary Europe ever since.  The notions or aspirations which he had picked up from a few books gave way to notions and aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the scenes of actual life into which he was thrown, and which found his character soft for their impression.  In one way the new pictures of a future were as dissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had been, and the sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a man to compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as the mental life among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.

Rousseau’s delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in him, and after him to spread in many hearts.  His room looked over gardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape.  “It was the first time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows.  Always shut in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and the dull gray of the streets.  How moving and delicious this novelty was to me!  It brightened all the tenderness of my disposition.  I counted the landscape among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if she had brought it there expressly for me.  I placed myself there in all peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the flowers and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingled together in my eyes.  My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, found itself more free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal vent among these orchard gardens."[47] Madame de Warens was the semi-divine figure who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmonious accent.  He had neither transports nor desires by her side, but existed in a state of ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing what.  “I could have passed my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without an instant of weariness.  She is the only person with whom I never felt that dryness in conversation, which turns the duty of keeping it up into a torment.  Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an inexhaustible stream of chatter, which never came to an end until