and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the
arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no
deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be,
it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his
partnership--and many others as well as he are said to have found in
this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,--Rousseau
had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends
pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly
brutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, how
much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the
shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from
beginning to end entirely voluntary? If he attached himself deliberately
to an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break
on any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as much
due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as to
the character of Theresa Le Vasseur? Nothing, as he himself said in a
passage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the true
leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachments
which he forms.[127]

It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to
charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this
particular way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer
persons. He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was
with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not
have been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in the
eighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a
kitchen wench. The selection was probably not very deliberate; as it
happened, Theresa served as a standing illustration of two of his most
marked traits, a contempt for mere literary culture, and a yet deeper
contempt for social accomplishments and social position. In time he
found out the grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with a
companion who did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was so
slight that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip and
quodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement,
and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a sombre life so
various, went for nothing with him. What his friends missed in h