[102] Corr., i. 43, 46, 62, etc.
[103] Musset-Pathay, i. 23, n.
CHAPTER IV.
THERESA LE VASSEUR.
Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delight perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, or even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The sight of simple hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former days into a present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching enough. But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in which Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his embarrassment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as a simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons. His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abbé of the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac (1714-80).
The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has ever been written, was not successful in the practical and far more arduous side of that master art.[104] We have seen how little training he had ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all who have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went well, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to confess that he was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand him, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of the disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, human excellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was ready to kill them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to render them either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacher himself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal his employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in the secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and some dear romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of this kind more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These are surely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng of worthier memories.
It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the deadly drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former days. "What rendered my present condition insupportable was the recollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my fountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt myself born and who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping of my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears under all the discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to quicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740—spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]