ration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was the
slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness. "Never," he
says, in his account of this hateful action, "was wickedness further
from me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it
is contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was the
cause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blame
from myself on to the first object that presented itself. When I saw her
appear my heart was torn, but the presence of so many people was too
strong for my remorse. I feared punishment very little; I only feared
disgrace, but I feared that more than death, more than crime, more than
anything in the world. I would fain have buried myself in the depths of
the earth; invincible shame prevailed over all, shame alone caused my
effrontery, and the more criminal I became, the more intrepid was I made
by the fright of confessing it. I could see nothing but the horror of
being recognised and declared publicly to my face a thief, liar, and
traducer."[32] When he says that he feared punishment little, his
analysis of his mind is most likely wrong, for nothing is clearer than
that a dread of punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strong
feeling with him at this time. However that may have been, the same
over-excited imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led him
into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties. It led him
to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen Marion in
consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful thought
haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights he
thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime that
seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.[33]
Thus the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain
of his gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side of
his history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness.
Rousseau expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would
serve as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of
another soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. We
may, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible
consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but
were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful
spirit. Indee