us as two children worthy of indulgence, and we both looked upon him as a respectable man, whose esteem it was our business to conciliate.  Thus there grew up between us three a companionship, perhaps without another example like it upon earth.  All our wishes, our cares, our hearts were in common; nothing seemed to pass outside our little circle.  The habit of living together, and of living together exclusively, became so strong that if at our meals one of the three was absent, or there came a fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of our peculiar relations, a tete-a-tete was less sweet than a meeting of all three."[70] Fate interfered to spoil this striking attempt after a new type of the family, developed on a duandric base.  Claude Anet was seized with illness, a consequence of excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition in search of plants, and he came to his end.[71] In him Rousseau always believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, “a rare and estimable man, in whom nature served instead of education, and who nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men."[72] The day after his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost friend to Madame de Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction, when suddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he should inherit the poor man’s clothes, and particularly a handsome black coat.  A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always somewhat nauseously called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought and washed away its last traces.[73] After all, those men and women are exceptionally happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought standing against themselves in that unwritten chapter of their lives which even the most candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast recollection.

Shortly after his return to Chamberi, a wave from the great tide of European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy.  In the February of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in the choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland.  France was for Stanislaus, the father-in-law of Lewis XV., while the Emperor Charles VI. and Anne of Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony.  Stanislaus was compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking up his quarrel, declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733).  The first act of this war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and the two Sicilies by Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the despatch of a French expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars, the husband of one of Voltaire’s first idols.  This took place in the autumn of 1733, and a French column passed through Chamberi, exciting lively interest in all minds, including Rousseau’s.  He now read the newspapers for the first time, with the most eager sympathy for the country with whose history his own name was destined to be so permanently associated.  “If this mad passion,” he says, “had