His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys, and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate.  So terrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence.  Madame d’Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of having destroyed some valuable papers belonging to a dead relative.  There was much idle and cruel gossip in an ill-natured world.  Rousseau, her friend, kept steadfast silence:  she challenged his opinion.  “What am I to say?” he answered; “I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and revolts me.  I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their injustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions, that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim.  What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person is to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like him."[225]

Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand, whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that “it is not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent.”  Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness.  Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times, requiring immediate acknowledgment.  “It is not just,” at length wrote the exasperated Rousseau, “that I should be tyrannised over for your pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either passed in suffering or it is lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ it usefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from wasting it in my own fashion.  A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings of the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master that I flee from the idle folk of towns,—­people as thoroughly wearied as they are thoroughly wearisome,—­who, because they do not know what to do with their own time, think they have a right to waste that of others."[226] The more abruptly he treated visitors, persecuting dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more obstinate they were in possessing themselves of his time.  In seizing the hours they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant irritation in his soul.  He appears to have earned forty sous for a morning’s work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly that he could not well subsist on less.[227] He had one chance of a pension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner.