d, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the
whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we
who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at
further length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy
who happened to grow up into a man of genius.[34]

After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or
cellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue,
Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese
person of quality. This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him
with a certain unusual considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt
the narrative. His son condescended to teach the youth Latin, and
Rousseau presumed to entertain a passion for one of the daughters of the
house, to whom he paid silent homage in the odd shape of attending to
her wants at table with special solicitude. In this situation he had, or
at least he supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimate
advancement. But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure of
stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his youth was the archtype of
the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited him,[35] and as almost
any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness of
imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of
Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects,
the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly
into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination again
went over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the
streams, began to absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious
satisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how
far more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age
and taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay
other than as it might please them. "It would be madness to sacrifice
such a piece of good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow,
difficult, doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one day
be realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of
true pleasure and freedom in youth."[36]

On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he
was dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their
homeward wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what
they s