There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador’s morbid quality, of which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing among men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking trait.  For instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three shoes are equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair which is more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his shoes in threes.[113] It was natural enough that such a master and such a secretary should quarrel over perquisites.  That slightly cringing quality which we have noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau’s hungry youthful time, had been hardened out of him by circumstance or the strengthening of inborn fibre.  He would now neither dine in a servants’ hall because a fine lady forgot what was due to a musician, nor share his fees with a great ambassador who forgot what was due to himself.  These sordid disputes are of no interest now to anybody, and we need only say that after a period of eighteen months passed in uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his count in extreme dudgeon, and the diplomatic career which he had promised to himself came to the same close as various other careers had already done.

He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation at the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and laying memorial after memorial before the minister at home.  He assures us that it was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left in his soul the germ of exasperation against preposterous civil institutions, “in which the true common weal and real justice are always sacrificed to some seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive of all order, and only adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong."[114]

One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau’s voyage to his new post.  The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the felucca, or passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto.  This, we may notice in passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of the fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left the least mark in any line of his writings.  He always disliked it, and thought of it with melancholy.  Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the want of space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw to lie down upon.  He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself.  “I manufactured,” he says, “a good bed out of my coats and shirts, sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out of my old cloak rolled up.  I made myself a seat of one trunk placed