ts feet, choosing to be noticed for an absurdity, rather than not be
noticed at all. It may be so, but this inversion of the ordinary form of
vanity is rare enough to be not unrefreshing, and we are very loth to
hand Rousseau wholly over to the pathologist before his hour has come.

II.

In the summer of 1754 Rousseau, in company with his Theresa, went to
revisit the city of his birth, partly because an exceptionally
favourable occasion presented itself, but in yet greater part because he
was growing increasingly weary of the uncongenial world in which he
moved. On his road he turned aside to visit her who had been more than
even his birth-place to him. He felt the shock known to all who cherish
a vision for a dozen years, and then suddenly front the changed reality.
He had not prepared himself by recalling the commonplace which we only
remember for others, how time wears hard and ugly lines into the face
that recollection at each new energy makes lovelier with an added
sweetness. "I saw her," he says, "but in what a state, O God, in what
debasement! Was this the same Madame de Warens, in those days so
brilliant, to whom the priest of Pontverre had sent me! How my heart was
torn by the sight!" Alas, as has been said with a truth that daily
experience proves to those whom pity and self-knowledge have made most
indulgent, as to those whom pinched maxims have made most
rigorous,--_morality is the nature of things_.[233] We may have a humane
tenderness for our Manon Lescaut, but we have a deep presentiment all
the time that the poor soul must die in a penal settlement. It is partly
a question of time; whether death comes fast enough to sweep you out of
reach of the penalties which the nature of things may appoint, but which
in their fiercest shape are mostly of the loitering kind. Death was
unkind to Madame de Warens, and the unhappy creature lived long enough
to find that morality does mean something after all; that the old hoary
world has not fixed on prudence in the outlay of money as a good thing,
out of avarice or pedantic dryness of heart; nor on some continence and
order in the relations of men and women as a good thing, out of
cheerless grudge to the body, but because the breach of such virtues is
ever in the long run deadly to mutual trust, to strength, to freedom, to
collectedness, which are the reserve of humanity against days of ordeal.

Rousseau says that he tried hard to prevail upon his fallen benefactress