in suffering without any sign of impatience even a second representation of his piece.  For himself, he could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre before it was over, he entered the famous cafe de Procope at the other side of the street, where he found critics as wearied as himself.  Here he called out, “The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; it wearied me to death.  It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that very Rousseau."[232] The relentless student of mental pathology is very likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and not on its feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be noticed at all.  It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth to hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.

II.

In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally favourable occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he was growing increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he moved.  On his road he turned aside to visit her who had been more than even his birth-place to him.  He felt the shock known to all who cherish a vision for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality.  He had not prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only remember for others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face that recollection at each new energy makes lovelier with an added sweetness.  “I saw her,” he says, “but in what a state, O God, in what debasement!  Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so brilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me!  How my heart was torn by the sight!” Alas, as has been said with a truth that daily experience proves to those whom pity and self-knowledge have made most indulgent, as to those whom pinched maxims have made most rigorous,—­morality is the nature of things.[233] We may have a humane tenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment all the time that the poor soul must die in a penal settlement.  It is partly a question of time; whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out of reach of the penalties which the nature of things may appoint, but which in their fiercest shape are mostly of the loitering kind.  Death was unkind to Madame de Warens, and the unhappy creature lived long enough to find that morality does mean something after all; that the old hoary world has not fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good thing, out of avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence and order in the relations of men and women as a good thing, out of cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues is ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, to collectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal.