ce. Rousseau was moved with
pity for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he
advanced to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur took
each other for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently
effective. This was the beginning of a union which lasted for the length
of a generation and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical
ending.[122] She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he was
convinced that he saw in her a woman of sensibility, simple and free
from trick, and neither of the two, he says, was deceived in respect of
the other. Her intellectual quality was unique. She could never be
taught to read with any approach to success. She could never follow the
order of the twelve months of the year, nor master a single arithmetical
figure, nor count a sum of money, nor reckon the price of a thing. A
month's instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the hours of the
day on the dial-plate. The words she used were often the direct
opposites of the words that she meant to use.[123]

The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who
have no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery
between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is
the stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by
it. When the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance
is time wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver their
judgments upon the conditions of success in the relations between men
and women, has flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very
inviting case. People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his
writings, and then fetter their elevated, susceptible, sensitive, and
humane creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that
April is the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine.
Now we have already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely
little he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set
either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was
touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by
moral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of
analysing a character, bringing its several elements into the balance,
computing the more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its
influence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or