hould eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy
fountain; they hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by
this wonder they should receive all that they might need. Their hopes
were not fulfilled. The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse
them from their reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and
to their secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked,
vagrancy was thus undisguised. They made their way by some means or
other across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was
undisturbed by any thought of a future. "To understand my delirium at
this moment," Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker
parts of his history than fits of vagrancy, "it is necessary to know to
what a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest
things, and with what force it plunges into the imagination of the
object that attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque,
the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea,
and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it."[37] It
was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all
through his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant
sensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an
ardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of
firm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous and
diseased love of self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen
interest for the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of
dreams that were made to look like sanity by the close and specious
connection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisses
happened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:--this was the
type of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards the autumn
of 1729, reached Annecy, penniless and ragged, throwing himself once
more on the charity of the patroness who had given him shelter eighteen
months before. Few figures in the world at that time were less likely to
conciliate the favour or excite the interest of an observer, who had not
studied the hidden convolutions of human character deeply enough to know
that a boy of eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet
have it in him to say things one day which may help to plunge a world
into conflagration.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Here is the line:--

Didier Rousseau. | Jean