f him if mind or body should fail, if either he should be
driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him,
instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious
panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror,
and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born
dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just
proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of
unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice,
which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse into
finer names.

When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke
to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could
never have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the
opinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large.
"He said that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right
to be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed
it to them not to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them
bread.... This was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our
quarrels that followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what
he insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I
ought not to do it."[230]

Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that
we easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to
fling up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry,
some trait is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him
unlike common men, reverent of truth and human dignity. There is a
slight anecdote of this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau.
The day after the representation of his piece, he happened to be taking
his breakfast in some public place. An officer entered, and, proceeding
to describe the performance of the previous day, told at great length
all that had happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, and
gave a circumstantial account of his conversation. In this story, which
was told with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word of
truth, as was clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke with
such intimacy sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes. The effect
on Rousseau was singular enough. "The man was of a certain age; he had
no coxcombical or swaggering air; his expression bespok