Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau
had set to music--that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaire
owed his seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money,
and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of
the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil,
for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On
one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the
arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came
to him by the death of his father.[137] He found the letter, and was
opening it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame
at his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece,
undressed, slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning,
he had forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was
delighted to find that it contained his money, but "I can swear," he
adds, "that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself." An
occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In
these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate
Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother
acquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born
child was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings.
Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same
heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on
the part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and
with such entire absence of any precaution with a view to their
identification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of the
day of their birth.[138]

People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from
the economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of
hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the
theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human
heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways,
one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good
reason to believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was
fully warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the
universe.[139] Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that
civilisation may one day reach a point when a plea like this shal