without any seeking on his part and without violence.  To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d’Houdetot came to the Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to the credit of human nature’s elasticity, the three passed a delightful afternoon.  The wronged lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he passed occasional slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven, if he had not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt.  He fell asleep, as we can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his very inadequate justification of Providence against Voltaire.[280]

In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of his mad passion.  His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it involved the perilous assistance of Madame d’Houdetot.  Fortunately her loyalty and good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him.  He found, or thought he found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent.  In despair at not being allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion, he did the most singular thing that he could have done under the circumstances.  He wrote to Saint Lambert.[281] His letter is a prodigy of plausible duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states had so little sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary, and was moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, that it is hard to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was his own dupe.  Voluntary or not, it is detestable.  We pass the false whine about “being abandoned by all that was dear to him,” as if he had not deliberately quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend he had; about his being “solitary and sad,” as if he was not ready at this very time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered him of a single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored.  Remembering the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read this:—­“Whence comes her coldness to me?  Is it possible that you can have suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in consequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue?  A passage in one of your letters shows a glimpse of some such suspicion.  No, no, Saint Lambert, the breast of J.J.  Rousseau never held the heart of a traitor, and I should despise myself more than you suppose, if I had ever tried to rob you of her heart....  Can you suspect that her friendship for me may hurt her love for you?  Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open to all sorts of affections, and no sentiment can spring up in them which does not turn to the advantage of the dominant passion.  Where is the lover who does not wax the more tender as he talks to his friend of her whom he loves?  And is it not sweeter for you in your banishment that there should be some sympathetic creature to whom your mistress loves to talk of you, and who loves to hear?”