he Marechale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau's
children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of
identification, and the author of _Emitius_ and his sons and daughters
lived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau with
singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness
of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. "The success of
your search," he wrote, "could not give me pure and undisturbed
pleasure; it is too late, too late.... In my present condition this
search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; and
considering the too easily yielding character of the person in question,
it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or for
evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite
of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of a
nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank
eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and
changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all
things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and
immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.

Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa
five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147]
but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which
anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. What
happened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two
guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his
wife. "This good and seemly engagement was contracted," he says, "in all
the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of
two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple act, I saw
the honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically
assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he
had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion
of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that are
married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy ceremony
names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed,
since I recognise no other. If it were a question of property to be
assured, then it would be another thing, but you know v