[35] Bacle, by name.

[36] Conf., iii. 168.

[37] Conf., iii. 170.  A slightly idealised account of the situation is given in Emile, Bk. iv. 125.

CHAPTER III.

SAVOY.

The commonplace theory which the world takes for granted as to the relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave the power and guidance of her physically stronger mate.  Even if this be a true account of the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of temperament among the many types of men, in which it seems as if the elements of character remain mere futile and dispersive particles, until compelled into unity and organisation by the creative shock of feminine influence.  There are men, famous or obscure, whose lives might be divided into a number of epochs, each defined and presided over by the influence of a woman.  For the inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions, for the constant it is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great decisive phases through which character has moved.

Rousseau’s temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms.  His sentiment was neither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectual demand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in which women sometimes excel.  It had neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy which makes close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom of faculty and completeness of work.  There is a certain close and sickly air round all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them.  We seem to move not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the fiery flames of lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of things not wholesome or manly.  “I know a sentiment,” he writes, “which is perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more delicious, which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very often apart from it.  Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is more voluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of the same sex could be its object; at least I have been a friend, if ever man was, and I never felt this about any of my friends."[38] He admits that he can only describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly ruled by elements that defy definition, and in Rousseau’s case the sentiment which he could not describe was a paramount trait of his mental constitution.  It was as a voluptuous garment; in it his imagination was cherished into activity, and protected against that outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but benumbs and disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation as Rousseau’s.  If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his character might very possibly have remained sterile.  That feeling was the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity.

When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of manhood.  This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights, was banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by the influence of a person who is one of the most striking types to be found in the gallery of fair women.