“The heart of my Theresa,” he wrote long after the first tenderness had changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into indifference on hers, “was that of an angel; our attachment waxed stronger with our intimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we were made for one another.  If our pleasures could be described, their simplicity would make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in which I would munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on two small chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure.  Here the window did duty for a table, we breathed the fresh air, we could see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though on the fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate.  Who shall describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a coarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint of wine which we drank between us?  Ah, what delicious seasoning there is in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul!  We used sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the time."[129]

Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the burden on their lives.[130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner of accepting consequences.  On the whole, Rousseau’s relations with this woman present him in a better light than those with any other person whatever.  If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry, jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering.  It sometimes even occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world.  People of a certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for bare love of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to feel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a woman who to everybody else was desperate.  One who is on bad terms with the bulk of his fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and confirm his conviction that they are all in the wrong, by preserving attachment to some one to whom general opinion is hostile; the private argument being that if he is capable of this degree of virtue and friendship in an unfavourable case, how much more could he have practised it with others, if they would only have allowed him.  Whether this kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau could always refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur.  Her family were among the most odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau’s eyes, including that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit.  Yet he bore with them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur until she had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity and lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.