On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he was dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their homeward wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what they should eat or wherewithal they should be clothed.  They had a toy fountain; they hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by this wonder they should receive all that they might need.  Their hopes were not fulfilled.  The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse them from their reckoning.  Before long it was accidentally broken, and to their secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty.  Their naked, vagrancy was thus undisguised.  They made their way by some means or other across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was undisturbed by any thought of a future.  “To understand my delirium at this moment,” Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker parts of his history than fits of vagrancy, “it is necessary to know to what a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest things, and with what force it plunges into the imagination of the object that attracts it, vain as that object may be.  The most grotesque, the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea, and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it."[37] It was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all through his life from the commonplace type of social revolter.  A vagrant sensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an ardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of firm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous and diseased love of self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen interest for the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of dreams that were made to look like sanity by the close and specious connection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisses happened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:—­this was the type of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards the autumn of 1729, reached Annecy, penniless and ragged, throwing himself once more on the charity of the patroness who had given him shelter eighteen months before.  Few figures in the world at that time were less likely to conciliate the favour or excite the interest of an observer, who had not studied the hidden convolutions of human character deeply enough to know that a boy of eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet have it in him to say things one day which may help to plunge a world into conflagration.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Here is the line:—­

Didier Rousseau. | Jean | ----------------------- | | David.  Noah. | |
Isaac (b. 1680-5, d. 1745-7).  Jean Francois. | | | -------------- | |
| JEAN JACQUES.  Jean.  Theodore.

(Musset-Pathay, ii. 283.)

[2] Picot’s Hist. de Geneve, iii. 114.