roduce heroism, but it is the
germ of all madnesses." ROUSSEAU: "Sirs, I leave the room if you say
another word more," and he was rising to fulfil his threat, when the
entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.[224]

His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up
a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned
daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys,
and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So
terrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame
d'Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of having
destroyed some valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was
much idle and cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her
friend, kept steadfast silence: she challenged his opinion. "What am I
to say?" he answered; "I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and
revolts me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their
injustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions,
that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a
cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim.
What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person
is to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like
him."[225]

Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little
pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand,
whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that "it
is not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent."
Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness.
Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the
letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times,
requiring immediate acknowledgment. "It is not just," at length wrote
the exasperated Rousseau, "that I should be tyrannised over for your
pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either passed
in suffering or it is lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ it
usefully for some one, I do not wish to be hindered from wasting it in
my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings of
the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master that
I flee from the idle folk of towns,--people as thoroughly wearied as
they are thoroughly wearisome,--who, because they do no