My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers, with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my dining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat, and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew, to warn me to seat myself at table.

Between my meals, when I was neither writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk in the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out on to the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out.

I passed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole three weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness."[115] These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable periods.

He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain gaiety in his life.

He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that an earlier century would have counted unholy.[116] He rarely sought pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.[117] It is pleasanter to think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which ten years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that French melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion.