e a man of merit,
and his cross of St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer. While he
was retailing his untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I
sat on thorns; I tried to think of some means of believing him to have
made a mistake in good faith. At length trembling lest some one should
recognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate without
saying a word; and stooping down as I passed in front of him, I went
out as fast as possible, while the people present discussed his tale. I
perceived in the street that I was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that
if any one had recognised me and called me by name before I got out,
they would have seen in me the shame and embarrassment of a culprit,
simply from a feeling of the pain the poor man would have had to suffer
if his lie had been discovered."[231] One who can feel thus vividly
humiliated by the meanness of another, assuredly has in himself the
wholesome salt of respect for the erectness of his fellows; he has the
rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity in one of them is as a
stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his own moral stature.
There is more deep love of humanity in this than in giving many alms,
and it was not the less deep for being the product of impulse and
sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites.

Another scene in a cafe is worth referring to, because it shows in the
same way that at this time Rousseau's egoism fell short of the
fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it. In
1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he
had written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading
or playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience of
the ways of the world and the heart of man. Rousseau was amazed and
touched by the indulgence of the public, in suffering without any sign
of impatience even a second representation of his piece. For himself,
he could not so much as sit out the first; quitting the theatre before
it was over, he entered the famous cafe de Procope at the other side of
the street, where he found critics as wearied as himself. Here he called
out, "The new piece has fallen flat, and it deserved to fall flat; it
wearied me to death. It is by Rousseau of Geneva, and I am that very
Rousseau."[232] The relentless student of mental pathology is very
likely to insist that even this was egoism standing on its head and not
on i