In 1761 the Marechale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau’s children, but without success.  They were gone beyond hope of identification, and the author of Emitius and his sons and daughters lived together in this world, not knowing one another.  Rousseau with singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him.  “The success of your search,” he wrote, “could not give me pure and undisturbed pleasure; it is too late, too late....  In my present condition this search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; and considering the too easily yielding character of the person in question, it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or for evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of a nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing.  He was both too self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.

Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147] but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage.  What happened appears to have been this.  Seated at table with Theresa and two guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his wife.  “This good and seemly engagement was contracted,” he says, “in all the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of two men of worth and honour....  During the short and simple act, I saw the honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, “it is not names that are married; no, it is persons.”  “Even if in this simple and holy ceremony names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed, since I recognise no other.  If it were a question of property to be assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that is not our case."[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage according to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words about property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law.  He and Theresa were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,[150] and Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.