Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while he and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy.  He had not forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money when he had it.[234] She was sunk in indigence, for her pension had long been forestalled, but still she refused to change her home.  While Rousseau was at Geneva she came to see him.  “She lacked money to complete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her an hour afterwards by Theresa.  Poor Maman!  Let me relate this trait of her heart.  The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from her finger to place it on Theresa’s, who instantly put it back, as she kissed the noble hand and bathed it with her tears.”  In after years he poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach his lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have been haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.[235] Here is the worst of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if the sensations happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the chance goes by, never to return, and then, as memory in the best of such temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old sentiment revives and drags the man into a burning pit.  Rousseau appears not to have seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to the end, like a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet mysterious perfume of many-scented night in the silent garden at Charmettes.  She died in a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease, misery, and neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heights above Chamberi.[236] Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of another world that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness; like a man who should illusorily confound the last glistening of a wintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming strength of the summer morning.  “If I thought,” he said, “that I should not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it."[237] To pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing gulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a moment’s relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been robbed of its object.  Yet would not men be more likely to have a deeper love for those about them, and a keener dread of filling a house with aching hearts, if they courageously realised from the beginning of their days that we have none of this perfect companionable bliss to promise ourselves in other worlds, that the black and horrible grave is indeed the end of our communion, and that we know one another no more?