r intelligence, without ideas,
almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that
the honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of
fortune to which he had any right to aspire.[50] So he was sent to the
seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began by
conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearance
happened to be displeasing to him. A second was found,[51] and the
patient and obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of
his new teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the
progress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case
as in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness
to physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by
press of more urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly
sensuous quality retained, that he should have remembered, and thought
worth mentioning years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at
the seminary of Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of
gingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the second had the
most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair hair and
large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that he was
one of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While at
Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and benevolent
priest,[52] and uniting the two good men thirty years after he conceived
and drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar.[53]

Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil
was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in
intellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau
ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was
one of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not
only the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the
temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain local
impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the old
transports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent
Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps
of the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass,
nor a fair little abbe who played the violin in the choir.[54] Yet he
was in so dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his
good-will