ed so plainly
for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school
was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this
is an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails
to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life
should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of
irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek
dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.

And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier
schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in
Genevese youth in after years. "In my time," he says admiringly,
"children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to
keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty,
combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of;
they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned
home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you
will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their
country and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day
of our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out
children at thirty."[15]

Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own
words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life
unhappily did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable
balance of impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used
to spend the day at Paquis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his
aunts, and who carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day I
was in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their
brightness pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and
I was moving them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth
cylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a
half-quarter turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two
longest fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear
the nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the
wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of
consternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought me to cease
my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I was
touched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the p