and rougher women, who saw the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many, whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime elements of the human lot.

III.

It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived at Chamberi, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house.  She had procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing.  It was only temporary, and Rousseau’s function was no loftier than that of clerk, who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations.  We may imagine how little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and ill-smelling fellow-workers.[68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any set of circumstances, his method was invariable:  he ran away from them.  So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular and grotesque endeavours.  Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a possible thing were not his.  He was pleased at his lessons while there, but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the fixing of an hour.  In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the same end as all the others.  He next rushed to Besancon in search of the musical instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage was confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.[69] Finally he abandoned the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow resources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly indefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite and miscellaneous affairs,—­if we are here, as so often, to give the name of affairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road to ruin.

The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing.  Madame de Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was her factotum.  He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words, firm, thrifty, and sage.  The too comprehensive principles of his mistress admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when Madame de Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of youth, Rousseau was delivered from them in an equivocal way by solicitous application of the same maxims of comprehension.  “Although Claude Anet was as young as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that he looked upon