This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young, and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of nature made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been attended with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in devout acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the goodness and bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more pitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only not a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh. Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madame de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, but far less absorbing and frightful, disorder, to which Rousseau was subject all his life long. It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves." Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my imagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees, languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams." This interval he employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine. The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, the transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort in the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagina

He soothed his emotions by associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous force. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the other quick, analogous in character but different, not handsome but animated by cheerfulness and feel

ing. To one of these he gave a lover, to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after much deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.

This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets, assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the three companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his Musical Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer possible. The fever of that literary composition of which he had always such dread, had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any side but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by his imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance was vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts "so as to produce a kind of romance." We have a glimpse of his mental state in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on anything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.1 The distance from all this to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other Plutarchians. "My great embarrassment," he says honestly, "was that I should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the austere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting invectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft delights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for, than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors on whose books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this inconsequence in all its

1 Conf., ix. 289.

force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over it, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to reason." 1 He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the New Heloïsa was turning his madness to the best account. That may be true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter to D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation a considerable element in literature or the drama, at the very time when he was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of his century, a rather indecent piece of invective? We may forgive inconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories, or two self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the form of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.

We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M. d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They were curious to see the eccentric man," as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his scandalized wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connexions. "He was walking in front of the door; he saw me first: he advanced cap in hand; he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and stalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?" 2 In the miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of this scene of high morals.

II.

The New Heloïsa was not to be completed without a further extension of morbid experience, of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of compressed passion. The feverish torment of

Conf., ix. 286.

2 D'Epinay, ii. 153.

mere visions of the air swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream. In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the sister-inlaw of Madame d'Epinay.' Her husband had gone to the war (we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert, whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Châtelet eight years before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house not very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence of her two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various occasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had partaken of its host's homely fare. But the time was not ripe; the force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too, depended with our hermit on the temperature: one who would have been a very ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication, which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the first interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the sorceress, he wept in the woods.

He talked to

himself for hours, and was of a black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object of this deadly fascination, his whole organization seemed to be dissolved. He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture, commixed with sicklier delight.

1 Madame d'Houdetot (b. 1730-d. 1813) was the daughter of M. de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748. The circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view of the vows common among the great people of the time, are given with perhaps a shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's Memoirs, i. 101.

2 Conf., ix. 281.

3 D'Epinay, ii. 246.

People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will, emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its convenient lines are lost to us, as we watch a being with soul all blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant unmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brute in spring-time, it would be less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the ever-struggling reason of man or woman in the grip of the foul thing, produces an aggravation of phrensy that makes the mental healer tremble. Add to all this lurking elements of hollow rage that his passion was not returned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he could not take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was a little despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw that his hairs were sprinkled with grey,—and the whole offers a scene of moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away with dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scaly shapes that haunted the warm primæval ooze.

Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in physical or mental attraction. She was now seven-andtwenty. Small-pox, the terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a yellowish tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow low; she was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by an excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and caressing expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free sprightliness of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was very slight, and there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and grace. She was natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimes found vent. Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it from yielding to any impulse of mirth. "She weeps with the best faith in the world, and breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody so happily born," says her much less amiable sister-in-law. Her husband was indifferent to her.

1 D'Epinay, ii. 269.