at great pains to protest
how compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive
sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practical
observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxious
to prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its
energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or
volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light
or as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that of
Madame de Warens is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which
belongs to the other sort, but it is essentially bound up with
sensibility, or readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry from
another soul. It is the slow, brooding, smouldering nature, like
Rousseau's own, in which we may expect to find the tropics.

To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor
soul like Madame de Warens is as if one should denounce flagrant want
of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was
incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and
confusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent
much time in search after secret elixirs and the like. "Quacks, taking
advantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantly
infested her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and
chemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms which would have made her
the delight of the best societies."[44] Perhaps, however, the too
notorious vagrancy of her amours had at least as much to do with her
failure to delight the best societies as her indiscreet passion for
alchemy. Her person was attractive enough. "She had those points of
beauty," says Rousseau, "which are desirable, because they reside rather
in expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a
soft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not
see a finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands."[45] She was full of
tricks and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup
and meats at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly
swooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an
hour or so she took her first morsel.[46] On the whole, if we accept the
current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so
little flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient to
people with a slight crazines