He was fascinated by a flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose company he wasted many hours, and the precious stuff of youthful opportunity.

He passed a summer day in joyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again, but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with him remained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in some of the traits of the new Heloisa and her friend Claire.[59] Then he accepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens to attend her home to Freiburg.

On this expedition he paid an hour's visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon.

Returning from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that might be taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook to teach music.

"I have already," he says, "noted some moments of inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself.