In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal Paul and Virginia (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe, counting among other delights that of seeing two summers in one year.[392] Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desire to make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should think of that as one of his chief pleasures.  To this we owe the following pictures of an interior from St. Pierre’s hand:—­

In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a house in the Rue Platriere, nearly opposite to the Hotel de la Poste.  We mounted to the fourth story.  We knocked, and Madame Rousseau opened the door.  “Come in, gentlemen,” she said, “you will find my husband.”  We passed through a very small antechamber, where the household utensils were neatly arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music.  He rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed his work, at the same time taking a part in conversation.  He was thin and of middle height.  One shoulder struck me as rather higher than the other ... otherwise he was very well proportioned.  He had a brown complexion, some colour on his cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and lofty brow, and eyes full of fire.  The oblique lines falling from the nostrils to the extremity of the lips, and marking a physiognomy, in his case expressed great sensibility and something even painful.  One observed in his face three or four of the characteristics of melancholy—­the deep receding eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic gaiety in a thousand little creases at the corners of the eyes, of which the orbits entirely disappeared when he laughed....  Near him was a spinette on which from time to time he tried an air.  Two little beds of blue and white striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of his furniture.  On the walls hung a plan of the forest and park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor.  His wife was sitting mending linen; a canary sang in a cage hung from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on to the sills of the windows, which on the side of the street were open; while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and pots filled with such plants as it pleases nature to sow.  There was in the whole effect of his little establishment an air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity, which was delightful.

A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit.  “He wore a round wig, well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full suit of nankeen.  His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat.”  He expressed his passion for good