Rousseau Part 5

He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in Paris.[121] Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who used to sit at table with her mistress and the guests of the house. The company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abbes, and other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come neither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her serving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved with pity for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he advanced to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Va.s.seur took each other for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently effective. This was the beginning of a union which lasted for the length of a generation and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical ending.[122] She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he was convinced that he saw in her a woman of sensibility, simple and free from trick, and neither of the two, he says, was deceived in respect of the other. Her intellectual quality was unique. She could never be taught to read with any approach to success. She could never follow the order of the twelve months of the year, nor master a single arithmetical figure, nor count a sum of money, nor reckon the price of a thing. A month's instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the hours of the day on the dial-plate. The words she used were often the direct opposites of the words that she meant to use.[123]

The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who have no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is the stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by it. When the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance is time wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver their judgments upon the conditions of success in the relations between men and women, has flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very inviting case. People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his writings, and then fetter their elevated, susceptible, sensitive, and humane creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that April is the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine.

Now we have already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely little he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by moral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of a.n.a.lysing a character, bringing its several elements into the balance, computing the more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its influence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or agitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air.

The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties of apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could only be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have left him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted sense. A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more fatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the stupidity of man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress to Rousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him than the subtle inhalations of softened and close enveloping companionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectual equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day. This is not the highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the point of view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned with the conditions of productive energy. He only sought to live, to be himself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind of nature was the best supplement for his own. As he said in an apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it,--you never can cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man himself knows anything about it.[124] "By the side of people we love,"

he says very truly, "sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the universe."[125]

Theresa Le Va.s.seur would probably have been happier if she had married a stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate than he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two.

She was a person accustomed to hardship and coa.r.s.eness, and so was he.

And he always systematically preferred the honest coa.r.s.eness of the plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the more hateful coa.r.s.eness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be, it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his partnership--and many others as well as he are said to have found in this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,--Rousseau had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends p.r.o.nounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from beginning to end entirely voluntary? If he attached himself deliberately to an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break on any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as much due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as to the character of Theresa Le Va.s.seur? Nothing, as he himself said in a pa.s.sage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the true leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachments which he forms.[127]

It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this particular way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer persons. He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not have been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in the eighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a kitchen wench. The selection was probably not very deliberate; as it happened, Theresa served as a standing ill.u.s.tration of two of his most marked traits, a contempt for mere literary culture, and a yet deeper contempt for social accomplishments and social position. In time he found out the grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with a companion who did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was so slight that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip and quodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement, and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a sombre life so various, went for nothing with him. What his friends missed in her, he did not seek and would not have valued; and what he found in her, they were naturally unable to appreciate, for they never were in the mood for detecting it. "I have not seen much of happy men," he wrote when near his end, "perhaps nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts, and of all the objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which has always given most contentment to myself."[128] This moderate conception of felicity, which was always so characteristic with him, as an even, durable, and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accounts for his prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elation in their ideal would a.s.suredly have found hostile even to the most modest contentment.

"The heart of my Theresa," he wrote long after the first tenderness had changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into indifference on hers, "was that of an angel; our attachment waxed stronger with our intimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we were made for one another. If our pleasures could be described, their simplicity would make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in which I would munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on two small chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure.

Here the window did duty for a table, we breathed the fresh air, we could see the neighbourhood and the people pa.s.sing by, and though on the fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shall describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a coa.r.s.e quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint of wine which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious seasoning there is in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We used sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the time."[129]

Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the burden on their lives.[130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner of accepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this woman present him in a better light than those with any other person whatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry, jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People of a certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for bare love of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to feel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a woman who to everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with the bulk of his fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and confirm his conviction that they are all in the wrong, by preserving attachment to some one to whom general opinion is hostile; the private argument being that if he is capable of this degree of virtue and friendship in an unfavourable case, how much more could he have practised it with others, if they would only have allowed him. Whether this kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau could always refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady kindness towards Theresa Le Va.s.seur. Her family were among the most odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes, including that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he bore with them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Va.s.seur until she had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity and lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.

In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a change in her affections. "I began to feel," he says, at a date of sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, "that she was no longer for me what she had been in our happy years, and I felt it all the more clearly as I was still the same towards her."[131] This was in 1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference more open, until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had proposed a separation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual change may have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of the whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are two good traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never console herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days miserably in a house of charity.[132] And the repudiation of her children, against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled, remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may suppose that there was that about household life with Rousseau which might have bred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was. Among other things which must have been hard to endure, we know that in composing his works he was often weeks together without speaking a word to her.[133] Perhaps again it would not be difficult to produce some pa.s.sages in Rousseau's letters and in the Confessions, which show traces of that subtle contempt for women that lurks undetected in many who would blush to avow it. Whatever the causes may have been, from indifference she pa.s.sed to something like aversion, and in the one place where a word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes her as rending and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries were at their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old, worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion and the most dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness, nearly friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated the old tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed it in words of such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting strength, as may touch even those whom his books leave unmoved, and who view his character with deepest distrust. "For the six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our union has lasted, I have never sought my happiness except in yours, and have never ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by what I did lately,[134] that your honour and happiness were one as dear to me as the other. I see with pain that success does not answer my solicitude, and that my kindness is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet to me to show. I know that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with which you were born will never change in you; but as for those of tenderness and attachment which were once reciprocal between us, I feel that they now only exist on my side. Not only, dearest of all friends, have you ceased to find pleasure in my company, but you have to tax yourself severely even to remain a few minutes with me out of complaisance. You are at your ease with all the world but me. I do not speak to you of many other things. We must take our friends with their faults, and I ought to pa.s.s over yours, as you pa.s.s over mine. If you were happy with me I could be content, but I see clearly that you are not, and this is what makes my heart sore. If I could do better for your happiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not possible. I have left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to your felicity. At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed with distress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finish my days in closest union with you. You know my lot,--it is such as one could not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it. I never had, my dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it was to pour out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to you, they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no more. My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only; my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy except with you. It is certain that if you fail me and I am forced to live alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a thousand times more cruelly still, if we continued to live together in misunderstanding, and if confidence and friendship were to go out between us. It would be a hundred times better to cease to see each other; still to live, and sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be necessary on my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content.

We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not blot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity of those we have pa.s.sed together."[135] Think ill as we may of Rousseau's theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct, yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's formulae, and can be content to leave to sure circ.u.mstance the tragic retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the great master's symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity on the heart. In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair had been stained by crimes shortly after its beginning. In the estrangement of father and mother in their late years we may perhaps hear the rustle and spy the pale forms of the avenging spectres of their lost children.

At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Va.s.seur was formed, Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly p.r.o.nounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau had set to music--that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zare owed his seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money, and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil, for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came to him by the death of his father.[137] He found the letter, and was opening it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame at his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece, undressed, slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning, he had forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was delighted to find that it contained his money, but "I can swear," he adds, "that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself." An occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother acquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born child was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings.

Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on the part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and with such entire absence of any precaution with a view to their identification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of the day of their birth.[138]

People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from the economist who turns it into an ill.u.s.tration of the evil results of hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways, one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good reason to believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was fully warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the universe.[139] Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that civilisation may one day reach a point when a plea like this shall count for an aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of the duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well as by the spread of both rational and compa.s.sionate considerations as to the blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as some red and naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellent reason for repudiating a woman, can never be a reason for abandoning a child, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to think it a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and the ensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls.

We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the result of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed selfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern, where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much self-respect put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will allow them to do. "I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived to reign among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I said to myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here, one may as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and without the least scruple."[140] By and by he proceeded to cover this nude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring that his children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in sending them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a citizen in Plato's Republic.[141] This is hardly more than the talk of one become famous, who is defending the acts of his obscurity on the high principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens of Plato's Republic "cheerfully and without the least scruple," and if a man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was given to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious mania. Writing a year or two before his death he had a.s.sured himself that his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a thousand times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being spoiled by their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and finally being taught to hate and betray their father by his plotting enemies.[142] This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives which led to the abandonment of the children and justified the act to himself at the time, with the circ.u.mstances that afterwards reconciled him to what he had done; for now he neither had any enemies plotting against him, nor did he suppose that he had. As for his wife's family, he showed himself quite capable, when the time came, of dealing resolutely and shortly with their importunities in his own case, and he might therefore well have trusted his power to deal with them in the case of his children. He was more right when in 1770, in his important letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted that example, necessity, the honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him entrust his children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and kept him from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties. "In this, far from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that I did what I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than my heart, which bitterly belies it."[143] This coincides with the first undisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been already quoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words which sounds through nearly all his other references to this great stain upon his life, excepting one, and this is the only further doc.u.ment with which we need concern ourselves. In that,[144] which was written while the unholy work was actually being done, he states very distinctly that the motives were those which are more or less closely connected with most unholy works, motives of money--the great instrument and measure of our personal convenience, the quant.i.tative test of our self-control in placing personal convenience behind duty to other people. "If my misery and my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so dear, that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to reproach me with. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better or at least a surer subsistence for them than I could myself have provided; this condition is above all others." Next comes the consideration of their mother, whose honour must be kept. "You know my situation; I gained my bread from day to day painfully enough; how then should I feed a family as well? And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession of author, how would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave me peace of mind enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings which hunger dictates are hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedily exhausted. Then I should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to tricks ... in short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for which I am penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, and their mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for them to be orphans than to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why have I not married, you will ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It was not fitting for me to contract an eternal engagement; and it will never be proved to me that my duty binds me to it. What is certain is that I have never done it, and that I never meant to do it. But we ought not to have children when we cannot support them. Pardon me, madame; nature means us to have offspring, since the earth produces sustenance enough for all; but it is the rich, it is your cla.s.s, which robs mine of the bread of my children.... I know that foundlings are not delicately nurtured; so much the better for them, they become more robust. They have nothing superfluous given to them, but they have everything that is necessary. They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants or artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or ride on horseback, but they would have strong unwearied legs. I would neither make authors of them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in handling the pen, but the plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for leading a healthy, laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the delight of seeing them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas, as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and I deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter, with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths of the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic sentences by which the writer in after times gained so famous a name. It is at any rate clear from this that the real motive of the abandonment of the children was wholly material. He could not afford to maintain them, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed by their presence.

There is a.s.suredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the structure of the family was undermined alike in practice and speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess his misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity of the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been invested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and by the author of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been commended in its full loveliness and n.o.bility. And at any rate, let Rousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen, sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and rather b.e.s.t.i.a.l opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the despatch of children to public inst.i.tutions, still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public inst.i.tutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on the one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of a poverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to give people who act as Rousseau acted, all that credit for self-denial and high moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. It really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to the gratification of physical appet.i.te the grotesque luxury of religious unction.

In 1761 the Marechale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau's children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of identification, and the author of _Emitius_ and his sons and daughters lived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau with singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. "The success of your search," he wrote, "could not give me pure and undisturbed pleasure; it is too late, too late.... In my present condition this search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; and considering the too easily yielding character of the person in question, it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or for evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite of one or two charming and graceful pa.s.sages, whether Rousseau was of a nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too self-centred and too pa.s.sionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.

Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147]

but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which anybody but himself would recognise as const.i.tuting a marriage. What happened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his wife. "This good and seemly engagement was contracted," he says, "in all the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple act, I saw the honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically a.s.sumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that are married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy ceremony names entered as a const.i.tuent part, the one I bear would have sufficed, since I recognise no other. If it were a question of property to be a.s.sured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that is not our case."[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage according to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words about property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He and Theresa were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,[150] and Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.

We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the window of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with "confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul," and that general comfort of sensation which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable condition either of duty done externally or of spiritual growth within.

It is perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of the soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh.

But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the plants of the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of the chief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to be able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most important of all realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates if we can never forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's if we can only think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we can simply remember that he denied his master. Our vision is only blindness, if we can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of deep mystic aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to believe that this coa.r.s.e Rousseau, scantily supping with his coa.r.s.e mate, might yet have many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are haunted by figures rather divine than human.

FOOTNOTES:

[104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost sagacious; witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M.

de Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works ent.i.tled _Melanges_, pp. 106-136. In the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that Rousseau rashly or otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as a vexatious superfluity (p. 132).

[105] _Conf._, vi. 471.

[106] _Ib._, vi. 472-475; vii. 8.

[107] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19.

[108] Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the pa.s.sage from Lord Chesterfield's Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a proper person with whom his son might in a regular and business-like manner open the elevating game of gallant intrigue.

[109] M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the editors of the Encyclopaedia by procuring information for them as to salt-works (D'Alembert's _Discours Preliminaire_). His son M. Dupin de Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain between two famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau's death, he married (in the chapel of the French emba.s.sy in London) Aurora de Saxe, a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the natural son of August the Strong, King of Poland. From this union was born Maurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand.

M. Francueil died in 1787.

[110] _Mem. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.

[111] _Ib._ vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.

[112] _Conf._, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau's handwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate at Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spread the report that Rousseau had been the amba.s.sador's private attendant.

For Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see _Corr._, v. 75 (Jan. 5, 1767); also iv. 150.

[113] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 55 _seq._

[114] _Conf._, vii. 92.

[115] _Conf._, vii. 38, 39.

[116] _Lettres de la Montagne_, iii. 266.

[117] _Conf._, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's opinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi.

132. (Ed. 1837.)

[118] _Lettre sur la Musique Francaise_ (1753), p. 186.

[119] _Conf._, ix. 232.

[120] _Ib._ vii. 97.

[121] Hotel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running between the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still squalid hostelry is now visible as Hotel J.J. Rousseau. There is some doubt whether he first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk.

vii. of the _Confessions_ is for the latter date (see also _Corr._, ii. 207), but in the well-known letter to her in 1769 (_Ib._ vi. 79), he speaks of the twenty-six years of their union. Their so-called marriage took place in 1768, and writing in that year he speaks of the five-and-twenty years of their attachment (_Ib._ v. 323), and in the _Confessions_ (ix. 249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also in the letter to Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving 1745 in one place (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with less than his usual care paid no attention to the discrepancy.

[122] _Conf._, vii. 97-100.

[123] _Conf._, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: "Mesiceuras ancor mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous la goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e rus pour vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous paleu ces paes mes le vre ... ge sui avestous lamities e la reu conec caceu posible e la tacheman mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bon amiess theress le va.s.seur." Of which dark words this is the interpretation:--"Mais il sera encore mieux remis quand je sera aupres de vous, et de vous temoigner toute la joie et la tendresse de mon coeur que vous connaissez que j'ai toujours eue pour vous, et qui ne finira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur qui vous parle, c'est pas mes levres.... Je suis avec toute l'amitie et la reconnaissance possibles, et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre humble et bonne amie, Therese Le Va.s.seur." (_Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, ii. 450.) Certainly it was not learning and arts which hindered Theresa's manners from being pure.

[124] _Oeuv. et Corr. Ined._, 365.

[125] _Conf._, vii. 102. See also _Corr._, v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). On the other hand, _Conf._, ix. 249.

[126] M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on Rousseau, speaks of him as "a bourgeois uncla.s.sed by an alliance with a tavern servant" (_Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Nov. 1852, p. 759); but surely Rousseau had uncla.s.sed himself long before, in the houses of Madame Vercellis, Count Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by his repudiation, from the time when he ran away from Geneva, of nearly every bourgeois virtue and bourgeois prejudice.

[127] _Conf._, vii. 11. Also footnote.

[128] _Reveries_, ix. 309.

[129] _Conf._, viii. 142, 143.