inconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories, or two
self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the form
of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.

We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance
with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M.
d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two
ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom
among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They were
curious to see the eccentric man," as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his
scandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to
parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections. "He was
walking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand;
he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and
stalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the
miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and
quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of
even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more
glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of this
scene of high morals.

II.

The New Heloisa was not to be completed without a further extension of
morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of
compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air
swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again
began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire
of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream.
In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the
sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay.[267] Her husband had gone to the war
(we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert,
whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Chatelet eight
years before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house
not very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence
of her two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various
occasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had
partaken of its host's homely fare.[268] But the time was not ripe; the
force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too,
depended with our hermit on t