then, however,” wrote Madame d’Houdetot, “he pities you more for your weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from joining the people who wish to blacken your character; we have and always shall have the courage to speak of you with esteem."[285] They saw one another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess d’Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together, happily without breach of the peace.[286] One curious thing about this meeting was that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint Lambert had interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with Diderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.[287] Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to have lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent good-will.  The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may serve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, when it no longer suits them to see one another.[288] It is at least certain that in them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends that he ever possessed.

III.

The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with catastrophe.  We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished itself in the case of Rousseau.  In many this brooding egoism produces a silent and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something of acridly corrosive quality.  One of the agents in this disastrous process was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders.  This disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from his infancy to the day of his death.  Our fatuous persistency in reducing man to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the history of a life is the history of a body no less than that of a soul.  Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two factions of moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuities of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have been nothing more than an item in a page of a pathologist’s case-book.  We are not to suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on no man’s malformations.  In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it is folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena.  In firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau’s, pain such as he endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form which this unsociality now first assumed.  Rousseau was never a saintly nature, but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his quarrels with Grimm and Madame d’Epinay and Diderot—­a tale of labyrinthine nightmares—­let us remember that we may even to this point explain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of insanity, unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many sane people very uncomfortable.