pleasure in my company, but you have to tax yourself severely even to remain a few minutes with me out of complaisance.  You are at your ease with all the world but me.  I do not speak to you of many other things.  We must take our friends with their faults, and I ought to pass over yours, as you pass over mine.  If you were happy with me I could be content, but I see clearly that you are not, and this is what makes my heart sore.  If I could do better for your happiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not possible.  I have left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to your felicity.  At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed with distress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finish my days in closest union with you.  You know my lot,—­it is such as one could not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it.  I never had, my dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it was to pour out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to you, they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no more.  My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only; my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy except with you.  It is certain that if you fail me and I am forced to live alone, I am as a dead man.  But I should die a thousand times more cruelly still, if we continued to live together in misunderstanding, and if confidence and friendship were to go out between us.  It would be a hundred times better to cease to see each other; still to live, and sometimes to regret one another.  Whatever sacrifice may be necessary on my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content.  We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not blot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity of those we have passed together."[135] Think ill as we may of Rousseau’s theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct, yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man’s formulae, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the great master’s symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity on the heart.  In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair had been stained by crimes shortly after its beginning.  In the estrangement of father and mother in their late years we may perhaps hear the rustle and spy the pale forms of the avenging spectres of their lost children.

At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed, Rousseau did not know how to gain bread.  He composed the musical diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some minor re-adaptations in Voltaire’s Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau had set to music—­that “farce of the fair” to which the author of Zaire owed