lets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs,
great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a
farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour
of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain
of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of
rouge and furbelows."[254] He was no anchorite proper, one weary of the
world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one
kind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he was now
about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his
inveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace a
past. He forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tender
benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in her hovel, his
house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot,
too, that since those days the various processes of intellectual life
had expanded within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes a
man's surroundings very critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportion
as a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on anything
external, whether on the greenness of the field or the gaiety of the
street or the constancy of friends, so comes he nearer to chance of
making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very root of the tragedy
lay deeper,--in temperament.

I.

Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls
of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). "Although it was cold, and
snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life;
violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were
beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the
first song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood
that touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I
was transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in
an instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. My
very first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic
objects about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my
quarters, I first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path
nor a copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out
before the end of the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than
wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no