while the mind is calm and courageous, or vice versa.  This is the key to many moral eccentricities.  When the two are united in one man, that man will be a cipher all his life; such double-sided timidity makes him what we call “an imbecile.”  Often fine suppressed qualities are hidden within that imbecile.  To this double infirmity we may, perhaps, owe the lives of certain monks who lived in ecstasy; for this unfortunate moral and physical disposition is produced quite as much by the perfection of the soul and of the organs, as by defects which are still unstudied.

The timidity of Jean-Jacques came from a certain torpor of his faculties, which a great teacher or a great surgeon, like Despleins, would have roused.  In him, as in the cretins, the sense of love had inherited a strength and vigor which were lacking to his mental qualities, though he had mind enough to guide him in ordinary affairs.  The violence of passion, stripped of the ideal in which most young men expend it, only increased his timidity.  He had never brought himself to court, as the saying is, any woman in Issoudun.  Certainly no young girl or matron would make advances to a young man of mean stature, awkward and shame-faced in attitude; whose vulgar face, with its flattened features and pallid skin, making him look old before his time, was rendered still more hideous by a pair of large and prominent light-green eyes.  The presence of a woman stultified the poor fellow, who was driven by passion on the one hand as violently as the lack of ideas, resulting from his education, held him back on the other.  Paralyzed between these opposing forces, he had not a word to say, and feared to be spoken to, so much did he dread the obligation of replying.  Desire, which usually sets free the tongue, only petrified his powers of speech.  Thus it happened that Jean-Jacques Rouget was solitary and sought solitude because there alone he was at his ease.

The doctor had seen, too late for remedy, the havoc wrought in his son’s life by a temperament and a character of this kind.  He would have been glad to get him married; but to do that, he must deliver him over to an influence that was certain to become tyrannical, and the doctor hesitated.  Was it not practically giving the whole management of the property into the hands of a stranger, some unknown girl?  The doctor knew how difficult it was to gain true indications of the moral character of a woman from any study of a young girl.  So, while he continued to search for a daughter-in-law whose sentiments and education offered some guarantees for the future, he endeavored to push his son into the ways of avarice; meaning to give the poor fool a sort of instinct that might eventually take the place of intelligence.