the closet. His worst offenses at this time were not such as would make
us condemn very harshly a lad of spirit. But Jean Jacques was not such a
lad. The last of his scrapes as an apprentice was important only from
its consequences. One afternoon he had gone with some comrades on an
expedition beyond the city gates. "Half a league from the town," say the
"Confessions," "I hear the retreat sounded, and hasten my steps; I hear
the drum beat, and run with all my might; I arrive out of breath, all in
a sweat; my heart beats; I see from a distance the soldiers at their
posts; I rush on; I cry with a failing voice. It was too late. When
twenty yards from the outpost I see the first drawbridge going up. I
tremble as I see in the air those terrible horns, sinister and fatal
augury of that terrible fate which was at that moment beginning for me.

"In the first violence of my grief I threw myself on the glacis and bit
the earth. My comrades laughed at their misfortune and made the best of
it at once. I also made up my mind, but in another way. On the very spot
I swore that I would never go back to my master, and on the morrow, when
the gates were opened and they returned to town, I bade them adieu
forever."

Thus did Rousseau become a wanderer at the age of sixteen. The duchy of
Savoy, into which he first passed, adjoined the republic of Geneva, and
was a country as fervently Catholic as the other was ardently
Calvinistic. The young runaway soon fell in with a proselytizing priest,
who gave him a good dinner and dispatched him, for the furtherance of
his conversion, to a singular lady, living not far off, at Annecy. This
lady, named Madame de Warens, about twelve years older than Rousseau,
was not long after to occupy a large place in his life. She belonged to
a Protestant family of Vevay, on the north side of the Lake of Geneva.
She, like him, had fled from her country, and apparently for no more