nd fatal augury of the inevitable lot which
that moment was opening for me."[21]

In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon,
we underestimate the unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as
this in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this will
is inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to the
fulfilment of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this,
wrote the unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in the
bosom of my religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, a
mild and peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformity
of work which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I should
have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good
friend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my
condition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life
obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully
in the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have
been regretted as long as any memory of me was left."[22]

As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual
organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need
seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who
declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity,
and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of
aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most
respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out
of this or that kingdom, of which in truth their own composition
finally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a
mother's womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen,
which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the
eighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into
a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are some
commandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unable
to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them
so much grace that they are able to observe them.

If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day
and its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire
delight. The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of
romance were instantly