dol
of women and young men?[247] Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to
suspect that this was a reason after the event, for no man was ever so
fond as Rousseau, or so clever a master in the art, of covering an
accident in a fine envelope of principle, and, as we shall see, he was
at this time writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive panegyric. In
this case he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did not
return to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand.
Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts whether
his fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as hostile to his love
of living solitarily and after his own fashion as the good people
of Paris.

Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay
wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by
fruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he
exclaimed in delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place
of refuge made for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good
friend had in the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced
by a pretty cottage exactly arranged for his own household. "My poor
bear," she said, "here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it,
'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion
of going from me."[248] Though moved to tears by such kindness,
Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for some
time longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.

In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was
dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage
in the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring
the moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to
mark the limit of his wants.[249] He wrote to her bitterly in reply,
that her proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have
but sorry appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a
friend into a valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed,
if only she would remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for
sale.[250] Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and
then Rousseau hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special
appreciation, and that he meant by the word valet "the degradation into
which the repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. The
inde