This book is DUE on last date stamped" iieto* UTHERN BRANCH -AL1F. i ROUSSEAU $&§$ ROUSSEAU BY JOHN MORLEY VOL t. do5z Hontion MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 1896 All rig /its reserved First printed in this form 1886 Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896 • • • s y\ NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION. This work differs from its companion volume in offering something more like a continuous personal history than was necessary in the case of such a man as Voltaire, the story of whose life may be found in more than one English book of repute. Of Eousseau there is, I believe, no full biographical account in our literature, and even France has nothing more com- plete under this head than Musset-Pathay's Histoire de la Vie et des Ouvrages de J. J. Eousseau (1821). This, though a meritorious piece of labour, is ex- tremely crude and formless in composition and arrangement, and the interpreting portions are devoid of interest. The edition of Rousseau's works to which the references have been made is that by M. Auguis, in twenty-seven volumes, published in 1825 by Dalibon. In 1865 M. Streckeisen-Moultou published from the originals, which had been deposited in the library of Neuchatel by Du Peyrou, the letters addressed to Rousseau by various correspondents. These two VI NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION. interesting volumes, which are entitled Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis, are mostly referred to under the name of their editor. February, 1873. The second edition in 1878 was revised; some por- tions were considerably shortened, and a few addi- tional footnotes inserted. No further changes have been made in the present edition. January, 1886. CONTENTS OF VOL. I. CHAPTER I. Preliminary. The Revolution ..... Rousseau its most direct speculative precursor His distinction among revolutionists His personality ..... PAGE V 2 4v 5 CHAPTER II. Youth. Birth and descent ....... 8 Predispositions ....... 10 First lessons ........ 11 At M. Lambercier's ...... 15 Early disclosure of sensitive temperament 19 Return to Geneva ....... 20 Two apprenticeships ...... 26 Flight from Geneva ...... 30 Savoyard proselytisers ...... 3V Rousseau sent to Annecy, and thence to Turin 34 Conversion to Catholicism ..... 35 Takes service with Madame de Vercellis . 39 VI 11 CONTENTS. Then with the Count de Gouvon Returns to vagabondage . And to Madame de Warens PAGE 42 43 45 CHAPTER III. Savoy. Influence of women upon Rousseau . Account of Madame de Warens Rousseau takes up his abode with her His delight in life with her The seminarists To Lyons ..... Wanderings to Freiburg, Neuchatel, ami Through the east of France Influence of these wanderings upon him Chamberi ..... Household of Madame de Warens L*s Charmettes .... \xccount of his feeling for nature His intellectual incapacity at this time Temperament ..... Literary interests, and method Joyful days with his lienelartress To Montpellier : end of an episode . Dates ...... 4b . 48 54 54 57 58 elsewhere . 60 62 67 v 69 . 70 . 73 7a/ 83 84 85 . DO 92 94 CHAPTER IV. Tiii:ri:s \ l.i Vasseur. Tutorship at Lyons to Paris in search of fortune 95 97 CONTENTS. His appearance at this time Made secretary to the ambassador at Venice His journey thither ami life there Return to Paris Theresa Le Vasseur Character of their union . Rousseau's conduct towards her Their later estrangements Rousseau's scanty means Puts away his five children His apologies for the crime Their futility .... Attempts to recover the children Rousseau never married to Theresa Contrast between outer and inner life IX PAGE 98 100 103 106 107 110 113 115 119 120 122 126 128 129 130 CHAPTER V. The Discourses. Local ncademies in France ..... Circumstances of the composition of the first Discourse How far the paradox was original His visions for thirteen years . Summary of the first Discourse Obligations to Montaigne And to the Greeks . Semi-Socratic manner Objections to the Discourse Ways of stating its positive side Daugers of exaggerating this positive sieine remue'es Avcc tons ses rayons et toutes ses nue'es ; Et In vase, fond morne, affreux, sombre et dormant, Oil dea reptiles noirs fourmillent vaguement. I J cuo. ROUSSEAU. So6z CHAPTEE 1 PRELIMINARY. Christianity is the name for a great variety of changes which took place during the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of thinking and feeling ahout their spiritual relations to unseen powers, about their moral relations to one another, about the basis and type of social union. So the Eeyolution is now . the accepted name for a set of changes which began faintly to take a definite practical shape first in America, and then in France, towards the end of the eighteenth century ; they had been directly prepared ^ by a small number of energetic thinkers, whose specu- \* lations represented, as always, the prolongation of some ^ old lines of thought in obedience to the impulse of new 56. - Reveries, iv. p. 189. "My master and counsellor, Plutarch,'' he says, when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. Corr., i. '265. II. YOUTH. 13 when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, " living by the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the tools of his craft. ( I see at his side a cherished son receiving- instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little fruit." 1 This did little to implant the needed impressions of the actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessive degree the exact reverse of our common method ; this stirs the imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the as;e of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a hot chafing-dish. 2 Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child, 3 and he com- 1 Dedication of the Discours sur VOrigine de V Inigalite, p. 201. (June, 1754.) 2 Conf.,i. 11. 3 lb. i. 12. 14 ROUSSEAU. OHAr. memorates the homely tenderness and cave with which his early years were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self- satisfying curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. The impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to the end ; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair. The con- . stant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he cherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, which places it in a closely- linked chain of active memories, and which most of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentariness of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I have no pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion and diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still often surprise himself uncon- sciously humming the tune of one of his aunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes. 1 This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in the course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that he saw 1 The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to her (Madame Concern) — one in 1754 (Corr., i. 204), another as late as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 ((Euvr. et Corr. f,M., 392). n. YOUTH. 17 silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves of temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience, unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of things, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul. 1 The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and existent. Circumstances brought - Efm under suspicion of having broken the teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not even the most terrible punish- ment could wring from him an untrue confession of guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence of falsehood, which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no credit, but in a furious and invincible resentment against the violent pressure that was unjustly put upon him. "Picture a character, timid and docile in ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its passions ; a child always governed by the voice of reason, always treated with equity, gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of injustice, and who for the first time experi- ences an injustice so terrible, from the very people whom he most cherishes and respects ! What a con- 1 See also Con/., i. 43 ; iii. 185 ; vii. 73 ; xii. 188, n. 2. VOL. I. G 18 ROUSSEAU. chav. fusion of ideas, what disorder of sentiments, what revolution in heart, in brain, in every part of his moral and intellectual being ! " He had not learnt, any more than other children, either to put himself in the place of his elders, or to consider the strength of the apparent case against him. All that he felt was the rigour of a frightful chastisement for an offence oi which he was innocent. And the association of ideas waiTpernianent. " This first sentiment of violence and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my soul, that all the ideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me; and this sentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has taken such consistency, and become so disengaged from all per- sonal interest, that my heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful action, just as much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read of the cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of some villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard such wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed. . . . This movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so ; but the profound recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too fast bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously." 1 To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest ira- 1 CW/\ i. 127-31. II. YOUTH. 19 pressions may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which remoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once had. This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that injustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the imaginary world of his read- ing, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal from the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another overtakes all men. " Here," he says, " was the term of the serenity of my childish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and I feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my infancy here comes to an end. . . . Even the country lost in our eyes that charm of sweet- ness and simplicity which goes to the heart ; it seemed sombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its beauties from our sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our plants, our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the earth, shout- ing for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown." Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the whole course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate description by as over- charged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of a constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of reaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come into contact with the sharp tooth of outer cir- 20 ROUSSEAU. chap. cumstance. Indeed, a man must be either miracul- ously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment But the urgent demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these pene- trative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud and collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims, without taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of self-collec- tion in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensi- tive and depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any of these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or oppression is the going out of a divine light. Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he showed special inclination. 1 It was a ques- tion whether he was to be made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of the three ; " for I thought it a fine thing," he says, "to preach." The uncle was a man 1 Cm/., i. 38-47. II. YOUTH. 21 of pleasure, and as often happens in such circumstances, his love of pleasure had the effect of turning his wife into a pietist. Their son was Rousseau's constant comrade. " Our friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together, the simplest amuse- ments were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses ; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an Italian showman with a troop of mario- nettes, they made puppets and composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. These ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this is an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek dramatist, for being con- cerned with more unheroic creatures. And this rough play of the streets always seemed 22 ROUSSEAU. CHAP. to Rousseau a manlier schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in Genevese youth in after years. " In my time," he says admir- ingly, "children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to keep. . . . Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty, combative among themselves ; they had no curled locks to be careful of ; they defied one another at wrestling, run- ning, boxing. They returned home sweating, out of breath, torn ; they were true blackguards, if you will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their country and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day of our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out children at thirty." 1 Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own words, and as they reveal a certain s^veeliiess in which his life unhappily did not after- wards greatTyabound,~~1t _ may~~help our equitable balance of impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used to spend the day at Paquis at Mr. Fazy's, who find married one of his aunts, and who carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day I was in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press ; their brightness pleased my eye ; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and I was moving them up and down with much satisfac- tion along the smooth cylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a half -quarter 1 Le.ttrc, d D'Alcmbcrt (1758), 178, 179. II. YOUTH. 23 turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two longest fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear the nails. I raised a piercing cry ; Fazy instantly turned back the wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of con- sternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and be- sought me to cease my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I was touched by his ; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the pond, where he helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. He entreated me with tears not to accuse him ; I promised him that I would not, and I kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew the origin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and for more than two months was unable to use my hand. But I persisted that a large stone had fallen and crushed my fingers." 1 The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of sensibility in its concluding words. " I was playing at ball at Plain Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over the game ; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a stroke so well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed my brains out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agita- tion like that of this poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had killed me. He threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms, while his tears poured down his cheeks, and he uttered 1 Riveries, iv. 211, 212. 24 ROUSSEAU. chap. shrill cries. I returned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of confused emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he tried to stop the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our two handkerchiefs were not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's ; she had a small garden hard by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of me in this condition ; she kept strength enough to dress my wound, and after bathing it well, she applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy, an excellent remedy much used in our country. Her tears and those of her son, went to my very heart, so that I looked upon them for a long while as my mother and my brother." 1 If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and Avomen lie floundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the field of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the discipline of this primitive good- ness. For character in a state of society is not a tree that grows into uprightness by the law of its own strength, though an adorable instance here and there of rectitude and moral loveliness that seem in- tuitive may sometimes tempt us into a moment's belief in a contrary doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious problem was never solved ; there was no deliberate preparation of his impulses, prepossessions, notions ; no foresight on the part of elders, and no gradual 1 Can/. 212, 213. II. YOUTH. 25 acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in the fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid zone of our relations with other people. It was one of the most elementary of Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that it is their education by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant capacity for virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems never to have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than the fact that he himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed to follow without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own temperament. Circum- stances were not indulgent enough to leave the experiment to complete itself within these very rudi- mentary conditions. Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was possessed also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three aunts were all in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at Bossey, " although Churchman and preacher," was still a sincere believer and nearly as good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so hearty, so discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from being wearied by the sermon, never came away without being touched inwardly and stirred to make virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion was rather more tiresome, because she made a business of it. 1 It would be a distinct 1 Con/., ii. 102, 103. 26 ROUSSEAU. chap. error to suppose that all this counted for nothing, for let us remember that we are now engaged with the youth of the one great religious writer of France in the eighteenth century. When after many years Rousseau's character hardened, the influences which had surrounded his boyhood came out in their full force and the historian of opinion soon notices in his spirit and work a something which had no counter- part in the spirit and work of men who had been trained in Jesuit colleges. At the first outset, how- ever, every trace of religious sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was left unprotected against the shocks of the world and the flesh. .At the age of eleven Jean J acques_3Eas-sent into a notary's office, but that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and insufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all countries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was ignominiously dismissed by his master ! for dumess and inaptitude ; his felloAV-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He was next apprenticed to an engraver, 2 a rough and violent man, who seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction. The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of torpedo the whole being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure sensations and among those ideas which arc nearest to sensations. There were no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau's universe. " The vilest 1 M. Masseron. - M. Ducommun. ri. YOUTH. 27 tastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my simple amusements, without even leaving the least idea behind. I must, in spite of the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate." The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritable sense, as the process,- on its negative side, of counteracting the inborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two degrees, of the constitution in which the reflective part is weak. There are the men who live on sensa- tion, but who do so lustily, with a certain fulness of blood and active energy of muscle. There are others who do so passively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The former by their sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world where reflection is a first condition, still go far. The latter succumb, and as reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such a world brine; them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surrounded with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery. Rousseau had none of this energy which makes oppression bracing. For a time he sank. It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He told lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He cunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of 28 ROUSSEAU. CHAP. using his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in idle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the gravity of an adult moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain ugliness of mien, and excite a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is actually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness, untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices. The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the e ducati on of home and family, and they presage definitely what is to come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown for this short space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn from their fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a little dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence which is not oblivion. After a time the character of Jean Jacques was II. YOUTH. 29 absolutely broken down. He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were terrible to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an overmastering physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to an end. He was now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades into sports for which he had little inclination, though he admits that once engaged in them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond the others. Such pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and on two occasions Eousseau found the gates closed on his return. His master when he presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting as we may imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a second sin in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always does. " Half a league from the town," says Rousseau, ' I hear the retreat sounded, and redouble my pace ; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top of my speed : I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat ; my heart beats violently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and call out with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpost sentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched those terrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the in- evitable lot which that moment was opening for me." 1 In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon, we underestimate the 1 Con/., i. 69. 30 ROUSSEAU. CHAP. unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as this in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this will is inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to the fulfilment of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this, wrote the unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in the bosom of my religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, a mild and peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformity of work which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. *" I should have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good friend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my condition, perhaps I might have honoured it ; and after living a life obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peace- fully in the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have been regretted as long as any memory of me was left." 1 As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity, and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out of this or that kingdom, of which in truth 1 Con/., i. 72. < II. YOUTH. 31 their own composition finally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a mother's womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen, which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are some commandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unable to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them so much grace that they are able to observe them. If Eousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day and its prospect of boundless adven- tures soon turned them into entire delight. The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of romance were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their realisation. He roamed for two or three days among the villages in the neighbourhood of Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in the cottages of friendly peasants. Before long his wan- derings brought him to the end of the territory of the little republic. Here he found himself in the domain of Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the traditional foes of the freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came to the village of Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon recalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feud had come to take new forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale the city walls, the descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenth century were 32 ROUSSEAU. chap. now intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the souls of the descendants of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this time a systematic struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and the ministers of Geneva, the former using every effort to procure the conversion of any Protestant on whom they could lay hands. 1 As it happened, the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this good work. 2 He made the young Eousseau welcome, spoke to him of the heresies of Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him some dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the nature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for the entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much. " I was too good a guest," writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, " to be a good theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent, was such a triumphant argu- ment on his side, that I should have blushed to oppose so capital a host." 3 So it was agreed that he should be put in a way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept Rousseau's assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid complaisance. He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices 1 J. Gaberel's Histoirc de VlZglise de Gendvc (Geneva, 1853- 62), vol. iii. p. 285. 2 There is a minute in the register of the company of minis- ters, to the effect that the Sieur de Pontverre "is attract in g many young men from this town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought to be warned." (Gaberel, iii. 224.) 3 Con/., ii. 76. II. YOUTH. 33 to which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he argues, " flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice ; it is oftener a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a man receives us, attaches us to him ; it is not to make a fool of him that we give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for good." He never really meant to change his religion ; his fault was like the coquet- ting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends, without permitting anything or promising any- thing, lead men to hope more than they mean to hold good. 1 Thereupon follow some austere reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his . friends ; and there are strictures even upon the mini- sters of all dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to believe ; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his worldly interests. All this is most just ; the occasion for such a strain of remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to impress us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few". months back. This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary element of a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthy consciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something, though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading. 1 Con/., ii. 77. VOL. I. D 34 KOUSSEAU. chap. The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21, 1728), Kousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage, whose name and character he has covered with doubt- ful renown. He expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant of days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a person not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing air, a fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the letters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was decided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to a monastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the true Church. At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faith and the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem of shelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elated with vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades the great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom he had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which he was about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in all possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement which hardly any Gcnevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemed II. YOUTH. 35 /^ the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined rustic festivals ; in the fields, joyful sports ; along the streams, hathing and fishing ; on the trees, delicious fruits ; under their shade, volup- tuous interviews ; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward without knowing whither." 1 ' He might justly choose out this interval as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life. It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy. The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the parties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into the circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mis- chievous zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been 1 Con/., ii. 90-97 36 ROUSSEAU. chap. brought up in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his present destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit." "The sophism which destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that exaggerates our condemnation, " is that of most men, who complain of lack of strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is only through our owu fault that virtue costs us anything ; if we could be ahvays sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous. But inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on without resistance ; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink into the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak % But in spite of ourselves, God