to leave Savoy, to come and take up her abode peacefully with him, while
he and Theresa would devote their days to making her happy. He had not
forgotten her in the little glimpse of prosperity; he had sent her money
when he had it.[234] She was sunk in indigence, for her pension had long
been forestalled, but still she refused to change her home. While
Rousseau was at Geneva she came to see him. "She lacked money to
complete her journey; I had not enough about me; I sent it to her an
hour afterwards by Theresa. Poor Maman! Let me relate this trait of her
heart. The only trinket she had left was a small ring; she took it from
her finger to place it on Theresa's, who instantly put it back, as she
kissed the noble hand and bathed it with her tears." In after years he
poured bitter reproaches upon himself for not quitting all to attach his
lot to hers until her last hour, and he professes always to have been
haunted by the liveliest and most enduring remorse.[235] Here is the
worst of measuring duty by sensation instead of principle; if the
sensations happen not to be in right order at the critical moment, the
chance goes by, never to return, and then, as memory in the best of
such temperaments is long though not without intermittence, old
sentiment revives and drags the man into a burning pit. Rousseau appears
not to have seen her again, but the thought of her remained with him to
the end, like a soft vesture fragrant with something of the sweet
mysterious perfume of many-scented night in the silent garden at
Charmettes. She died in a hovel eight years after this, sunk in disease,
misery, and neglect, and was put away in the cemetery on the heights
above Chamberi.[236] Rousseau consoled himself with thoughts of another
world that should reunite him to her and be the dawn of new happiness;
like a man who should illusorily confound the last glistening of a
wintry sunset seen through dark yew-branches, with the broad-beaming
strength of the summer morning. "If I thought," he said, "that I should
not see her in the other life, my poor imagination would shrink from the
idea of perfect bliss, which I would fain promise myself in it."[237] To
pluck so gracious a flower of hope on the edge of the sombre unechoing
gulf of nothingness into which our friend has slid silently down, is a
natural impulse of the sensitive soul, numbing remorse and giving a
moment's relief to the hunger and thirst of a tenderness that has been
robbed of