is is what makes my heart sore. If I could do better for your
happiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not possible. I
have left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to your
felicity. At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed with
distress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finish
my days in closest union with you. You know my lot,--it is such as one
could not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it. I never
had, my dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it
was to pour out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to
you, they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no
more. My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only;
my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy except
with you. It is certain that if you fail me and I am forced to live
alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a thousand times more
cruelly still, if we continued to live together in misunderstanding, and
if confidence and friendship were to go out between us. It would be a
hundred times better to cease to see each other; still to live, and
sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be necessary on
my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content.
We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not
blot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity
of those we have passed together."[135] Think ill as we may of
Rousseau's theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct,
yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's
formulae, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic
retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the great
master's symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity
on the heart. In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair had
been stained by crimes shortly after its beginning. In the estrangement
of father and mother in their late years we may perhaps hear the rustle
and spy the pale forms of the avenging spectres of their lost children.

At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed,
Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical
diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly
pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some
minor re-adaptations in