his mistress, and he set the change down to his friend, though not on the true grounds.  “Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken to me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found hard to bear.”  In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or religion.  If Madame d’Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had ceased to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might be spared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and conscience in so austere an adviser.[283]

It is well known how effectively one with a germ of good principle in him is braced by being thought better than he is.  With this letter in his hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last interview with Madame d’Houdetot.  Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less wise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man.  As it was, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm, infinitely more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which had seized him before.  They formed the project of a close companionship of three, including the absent lover; and they counted on the project coming more true than such designs usually do, “since all the feelings that can unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it, and we three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to suffice to ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others.”  What happened was this.  Madame d’Houdetot for the next three or four months, which were among the most bitter in Rousseau’s life, for then the bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to be borne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerate letters that a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the most petulant, suspicious, perverse, and irrestrainable of men.  For patience and exquisite sweetness of friendship some of these letters are matchless, and we can only conjecture the wearing querulousness of the letters to which they were replies.  If through no fault of her own she had been the occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shook off the consequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counsel and grave tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough of suspicion and despair into which he was plunged.[284] In the beginning of 1758 there was a change.  Rousseau’s passion for her somehow became known to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was the cause of a passing disturbance between him and his mistress.  Saint Lambert throughout acted like a man who is thoroughly master of himself.  At first, we learn, he ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue which he sought in him, and which he was persuaded that he found in him.  “Since