o pictures of the last waste and
obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently
fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits--a Schiller, a
Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many
hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to
follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient
friends, and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade
of copying music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until
half-past seven; munched his breakfast, arranging on paper during the
process such plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon; then he
returned to his work, dined at half-past twelve, and went forth to
take coffee at some public place. He would not return from his walk
until nightfall, and he retired at half-past ten. The pavements of
Paris were hateful to him because they tore his feet, and, said he,
with deeply significant antithesis, "I am not afraid of death, but I
dread pain." He always found his way as fast as possible to one of the
suburbs, and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Valerien
in the sunset. "Atheists," he said calumniously, "do not love the
country; they like the environs of Paris, where you have all the
pleasures of the city, good cheer, books, pretty women; but if you
take these things away, then they die of weariness." The note of every
bird held him attentive, and filled his mind with delicious images. A
graceful story is told of two swallows who made a nest in Rousseau's
sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. "I was no more than a
doorkeeper for them," he said, "for I kept opening the window for them
every moment. They used to fly with a great stir round my head, until
I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention between these
swallows and me."

In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal _Paul
and Virginia_ (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote
to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe,
counting among other delights that of seeing two summers in one
year.[392] Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desire
to make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should think
of that as one of his chief pleasures. To this we owe the following
pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's hand:--

In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to
take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me