Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in intellectual faculty.  It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts.  This was one of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not only the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain local impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the old transports anew.  He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps of the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass, nor a fair little abbe who played the violin in the choir.[54] Yet he was in so dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his good-will nor his assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, not even music.  His teacher, one Le Maitre, belonged to that great class of irregular and disorderly natures with which Rousseau’s destiny, in the shape of an irregular and disorderly temperament of his own, so constantly brought him into contact.  Le Maitre could not work without the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his passion for his art landed him a sot.  He took offence at a slight put upon him by the precentor of the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and left Annecy in a furtive manner along with Rousseau, whom the too comprehensive solicitude of Madame de Warens despatched to bear him company.  They went together as far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician happened to fall into an epileptic fit in the street.  Rousseau called for help, informed the crowd of the poor man’s hotel, and then seizing a moment when no one was thinking about him, turned the street corner and finally disappeared, the musician being thus “abandoned by the only friend on whom he had a right to count."[55] It thus appears that a man maybe exquisitely moved by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the fairness of smiling gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a qualm of misgiving of leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange place.  It has ceased to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are done by people with an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature.  At the moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and Madame de Warens.  “It is not,” he says in words of profound warning, which many men have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy dawn that swell into huge purgatorial aeons,—­“it is not when we have just done a bad action, that it torments us; it is when we recall it long after, for the memory of it can never be thrust out."[56]

II.