* * * * *

We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau’s soul with bitterness and suspicion, but sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic’s meal in the window of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with “confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul,” and that general comfort of sensation which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable condition either of duty done externally or of spiritual growth within.  It is perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of the soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh.  But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the plants of the field with strange and silent stirrings.  It is one of the chief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to be able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most important of all realities.  We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates if we can never forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David’s if we can only think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter’s if we can simply remember that he denied his master.  Our vision is only blindness, if we can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of deep mystic aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to believe that this coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse mate, might yet have many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are haunted by figures rather divine than human.

FOOTNOTES: 

[104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost sagacious; witness the Projet pour l’Education, etc., submitted to M. de Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works entitled Melanges, pp. 106-136.  In the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that Rousseau rashly or otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as a vexatious superfluity (p. 132).

[105] Conf., vi. 471.

[106] Ib., vi. 472-475; vii. 8.

[107] Conf., vii. 18, 19.

[108] Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a proper person with whom his son might in a regular and business-like manner open the elevating game of gallant intrigue.

[109] M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the editors of the Encyclopaedia by procuring information for them as to salt-works (D’Alembert’s Discours Preliminaire).  His son M. Dupin de Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain between two famous personages.  In 1777, the year before Rousseau’s death, he married (in the chapel of the French embassy in London) Aurora de Saxe, a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the natural son of August the Strong, King of Poland.  From this union was born Maurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand.  M. Francueil died in 1787.