440 PRÆTERITA-II

and haunting the hollows of the black, cold, herbless rocks that are continually shaken by their spray, has perhaps the nearest approach to the look of a spiritual existence I know in animal life.

“Saturday, May 5th.-Back to Chambéry, and up by Rousseau’s house to the point where the thunder-shower came down on us three years ago.”

210. I think it was extremely pretty and free-hearted of my mother to make these reverent pilgrimages to Rousseau’s house.*

With whom I must here thankfully name, among my own masters, also St. Pierre:¹ I having shamefully forgotten hitherto the immense influence of Paul and Virginia amidst my early readings. Rousseau’s effective political power I did not know till much later.

211. Richard Fall arrived that Saturday at Chambéry; and by way of amends for our lost Welsh tour, (above, § 60,) I took him to Vevay and Chamouni, where, on May 14th, the snow was still down to the valley; crisp frost everywhere; the Montanvert path entirely hidden, and clear slopes down all the couloirs perfectly even and smooth-ten to twenty feet deep of good, compact snow; no treacherous surface beds that could slip one over the other.

Couttet and I took Richard up to the cabane of the Montanvert, memory of the long snow walks at Herne Hill now mingling tenderly with the cloudless brightness of the Mer de Glace, in its robe of winter ermine. No venturing

* “Les Charmettes.” So also “un détachement de la troupe” (of his schoolboys) “sous la conduite de Mr. Topffer, qui ne sait pas le chemin, entreprend de gravir le coteau des Charmettes, pour atteindre à l’habitation de Jean-Jacques Rousseau”-in the year 1833; and an admirably faithful and vivid drawing of the place, as it then stood (unchanged till 1849, when papa and mamma and their little St. Preux saw it), is given by Mr. Topffer’s own hand on p. 17² of his work here quoted, Voyage à la Grande Chartreuse (1833).

¹ [For Rousseau as one of Ruskin’s masters, see Vol. XVIII. p. lxii.; for other references to St. Pierre, see Vol. III. p. 597, Vol. XXIV. p. 294.]

² [At p. 21 of the collected Nouveaux Voyages en Zigzag, 1854.]

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