Rousseau wrote in the New Heloisa very sagely that you should grant to the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything.  He admits that the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d’Houdetot.  Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather than to himself.  What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see.  Honest pity seems to have been the strongest of them.  She was idle and unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity of emotion, even towards an importunate lover.  She thought him mad, and she wrote to Saint Lambert to say so.  “His madness must be very strong,” said Saint Lambert, “since she can perceive it."[276]

Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a fixed and stagnant mood.  The man is awakened from his dream of passion by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and garnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered unseen.  In short, such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first stage marked by ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel.  When a man lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct appointed by his relations with others, still the reality of such relations survives.  He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save him either from his own passion, or from some degree of that kinship with others which instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of brass around him.  Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer most from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious of having fallen at all.

One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit.  He found Madame d’Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her cheeks.  A bird of the air had carried the matter.  As usual, the matter was carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was that Rousseau’s high principles had persuaded Madame d’Houdetot of the viciousness of her relations with her lover.[277] “They have played us an evil turn,” cried Madame d’Houdetot; “they have been unjust to me, but that is no matter.  Either let us break off at once, or be what you ought to be."[278] This was Rousseau’s first taste of the ashes of shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked at the expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed.  Mortification of the considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after this lapse, was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was pointed by the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his monitress was younger than himself.  He could never master his own contempt for the gallantry of grizzled locks.[279] His austerer self might at any rate have been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of the end, though the end came