erve for one's self some door of escape, and devotional scruples
cut everything short."[215] Or here: "I do not distrust anybody, for
that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no
trouble in this."[216] Or again in the word thrown to a man vaunting the
probity of some one: "What! can a man of intelligence like you accept
the prejudice of _meum_ and _tuum_?"[217] Such speech, however, was
probably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, as
who should go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, without
anything more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peaked
toes. "She was absolutely charming," said one of a new-comer; "she did
not utter one single word that was not a paradox."[218] This was the
passing taste. Human nature is able to keep itself wholesome in
fundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as wise as it
is charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make large
allowances for mere costume and assumed character.

In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is
exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is
most jarring and least easily forgiven. There is a certain stage in an
observant person's experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native
folly of men and women--and if his observation be conducted in a
catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in
others--when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements strikes
him as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the
universe. Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculous
result, the provisional and temporary sanity of things, and he
confronted society with eyes of angry chagrin. A great lady asked him
how it was that she had not seen him for an age. "Because when I wish to
see you, I wish to see no one but you. What do you want me to do in the
midst of your society? I should cut a sorry figure in a circle of
mincing tripping coxcombs; they do not suit me." We cannot wonder that
on some occasion when her son's proficiency was to be tested before a
company of friends, Madame d'Epinay prayed Rousseau to be of them, on
the ground that he would be sure to ask the child outrageously absurd
questions, which would give gaiety to the affair.[219] As it happened,
the father was unwise. He was a man of whom it was said that he had
devoured two million francs, without either saying or doing