We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron.  M. d’Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy.  “They were curious to see the eccentric man,” as M. d’Epinay afterwards told his scandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections.  “He was walking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand; he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and stalked off as fast as he could.  Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau’s life, we are glad of even one trait of masculine robustness.  We should perhaps be still more glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of this scene of high morals.

II.

The New Heloisa was not to be completed without a further extension of morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of compressed passion.  The feverish torment of mere visions of the air swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream.  In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d’Houdetot, the sister-in-law of Madame d’Epinay.[267] Her husband had gone to the war (we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert, whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire’s Marquise du Chatelet eight years before.  She rode over in man’s guise to the Hermitage from a house not very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence of her two natural protectors.  Rousseau had seen her before on various occasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had partaken of its host’s homely fare.[268] But the time was not ripe; the force of a temptation is not from without but within.  Much, too, depended with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a very ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic.  His fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication, which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited the world to hear the story of.  He may truly say that after the first interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had thirstily drained a poisoned bowl.  A sort of palsy struck him.  He lay weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the sorceress he wept in the woods.[269] He talked to himself for hours, and was of a black humour to his house-mates.  When approaching the object of this deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved.  He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture, commixed with sicklier delight.