under fine manners and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the arithmetical table.  Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be, it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his partnership—­and many others as well as he are said to have found in this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,—­Rousseau had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding.  Granting that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from beginning to end entirely voluntary?  If he attached himself deliberately to an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break on any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as much due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as to the character of Theresa Le Vasseur?  Nothing, as he himself said in a passage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the true leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachments which he forms.[127]

It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this particular way.  Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer persons.  He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not have been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in the eighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a kitchen wench.  The selection was probably not very deliberate; as it happened, Theresa served as a standing illustration of two of his most marked traits, a contempt for mere literary culture, and a yet deeper contempt for social accomplishments and social position.  In time he found out the grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with a companion who did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was so slight that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip and quodlibets.  But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement, and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a sombre life so various, went for nothing with him.  What his friends missed in her, he did not seek and would not have valued; and what he found in her, they were naturally unable to appreciate, for they never were in the mood for detecting it.  “I have not seen much of happy men,” he wrote when near his end, “perhaps nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts, and of all the objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which has always given most contentment to myself."[128] This moderate conception of felicity, which was always so characteristic with him, as an even, durable, and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accounts for his prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elation in their ideal would assuredly have found hostile even to the most modest contentment.