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Book VV Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus, Hortus ubi, et tecto minus aqua fins; Etpaululum sylvasuper hisforet.2 I cannot add: cwctius atque Di meliusfecere: but no matter; I did not need anything more; I did not need even the property: the enjoyment of it was enough for me; and for a long time I have said and felt that the owner and the possessor are often two very different persons; even leaving aside husbands and lovers. Here begins the short happiness of my life; here come the peaceful but quickly passing moments which have given me the right to say that I have lived. Precious and regretted moments, ah begin your lovable course for me again; flow more slowly in my remembrance, if it is possible, than you really did in your fleeting passage. What can I do to prolong this very touching and simple narrative at my pleasure; to say the same things over and over again, and in repeating them not to bore my readers more than I bore myself by endlessly beginning them over again? Besides if all that consisted in deeds, in actions, in words, I could describe it and render it in some fashion: but how can I say what was neither said, nor done, nor even thought, but tasted,3 but felt, without my being able to express any object of my happiness except this very feeling. I rose with the sun and I was happy; I took a walk and I was happy, I saw mamma and I was happy, I left her and I was happy,4 1 roamed through the woods, the hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I was idle, I worked in the garden, I gathered fruits, I helped with the housekeeping, and happiness followed me everywhere; it was not in any definable thing, it was entirely in me, it could not depart from me for a single instant. Nothing that happened to me during this cherished epoch, nothing I did, said, and thought all the time it lasted has escaped my memory. The times that precede and follow come back to me intermittently. I recall them unevenly and confusedly; but I recall this one completely as if it were still going on. My imagination, which always went forward in my youth and now goes backward, makes up for the hope I have lost forever by means of these sweet remembrances. I no longer see anything in the future that tempts me; only returns to the past can soothe me, and these 189 ipo Confessions returns, so lively and so true in the epoch about which I am speaking, often make me live happily in spite of my misfortunes. I will give a single example of these remembrances which will enable one to judge their strength and truth. The first day that we went to sleep at Les Charmettes, Mamma was in a sedan chair, and I followed her on foot. The road climbs, she was rather heavy, and, being afraid of tiring her porters too much, she wanted to get out about halfway there to go the rest on foot. While walking she sees something blue in the hedge and says to me, "There is some periwinkle still in bloom." I had never seen periwinkle, I did not bend over to examine it, and I am too near-sighted to distinguish plants on the ground from my full height. I cast a glance at that one only in passing, and almost thirty years went by without me seeing periwinkle, or without me paying attention to it. In 1764 while I was at Cressier with my friend M. du Peyrou,5 we climbed a little mountain on the summit of which he has a pretty trellised enclosure that he justly calls Belle-vue. Then I began to herbalize a little. While climbing and looking among the bushes I let out a shout of joy, "Ah, there is some periwinkle19 -^ and in fact it was so. Du Peyrou noticed the outburst, but he did not know its cause; he will learn it, I hope when he reads this someday . From the impression of such a little object the reader can judge about the one made on me by all those that relate to the same epoch. Nevertheless, the country air did not give me back my former health at all. I was languishing; I became worse. I could not bear milk, I had...

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