When we left Paris we were sorrowful and wrapped in thought.  This Babel is not our home.  Emile casts a scornful glance towards the great city, saying angrily, “What a time we have wasted; the bride of my heart is not there.  My friend, you knew it, but you think nothing of my time, and you pay no heed to my sufferings.”  With steady look and firm voice I reply, “Emile, do you mean what you say?” At once he flings his arms round my neck and clasps me to his breast without speaking.  That is his answer when he knows he is in the wrong.

And now we are wandering through the country like true knights-errant; yet we are not seeking adventures when we leave Paris; we are escaping from them; now fast now slow, we wander through the country like knights-errants.  By following my usual practice the taste for it has become established; and I do not suppose any of my readers are such slaves of custom as to picture us dozing in a post-chaise with closed windows, travelling, yet seeing nothing, observing nothing, making the time between our start and our arrival a mere blank, and losing in the speed of our journey, the time we meant to save.

Men say life is short, and I see them doing their best to shorten it.  As they do not know how to spend their time they lament the swiftness of its flight, and I perceive that for them it goes only too slowly.  Intent merely on the object of their pursuit, they behold unwillingly the space between them and it; one desires to-morrow, another looks a month ahead, another ten years beyond that.  No one wants to live to-day, no one contents himself with the present hour, all complain that it passes slowly.  When they complain that time flies, they lie; they would gladly purchase the power to hasten it; they would gladly spend their fortune to get rid of their whole life; and there is probably not a single one who would not have reduced his life to a few hours if he had been free to get rid of those hours he found tedious, and those which separated him from the desired moment.  A man spends his whole life rushing from Paris to Versailles, from Versailles to Paris, from town to country, from country to town, from one district of the town to another; but he would not know what to do with his time if he had not discovered this way of wasting it, by leaving his business on purpose to find something to do in coming back to it; he thinks he is saving the time he spends, which would otherwise be unoccupied; or maybe he rushes for the sake of rushing, and travels post in order to return in the same fashion.  When will mankind cease to slander nature?  Why do you complain that life is short when it is never short enough for you?  If there were but one of you, able to moderate his desires, so that he did not desire the flight of time, he would never find life too short; for him life and the joy of life would be one and the same; should he die young, he would still die full of days.

If this were the only advantage of my way of travelling it would be enough.  I have brought Emile up neither to desire nor to wait, but to enjoy; and when his desires are bent upon the future, their ardour is not so great as to make time seem tedious.  He will not only enjoy the delights of longing, but the delights of approaching the object of his desires; and his passions are under such restraint that he lives to a great extent in the present.