f dealing with them was so
much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of
its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century.
One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site
which he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant,
half dead with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing
more restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently,
after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a
small trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some
meat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then
he explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none
of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on
account of the duties, and his bread on account of the _taille_, and
declared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was not
dying of hunger. All this made an impression on Rousseau which he never
forgot. "Here," he says, "was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred
which afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harass
the common people, and against all their oppressors. This man actually
did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow,
and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned
around him."[67]

It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company,
that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old
order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a
deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had
wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept
in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw
the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all
never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them
as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with
their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many,
whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime
elements of the human lot.

III.

It was, then, some time towards the middle of 17