exercise hospitality. I
entreated the man to get me some dinner, offering to pay for it. He
presented me with some skimmed milk and coarse barley bread,
observing that that was all he had. I drank the milk with delight,
and ate the bread, chaff and all; but this was not very restorative
to a man exhausted with fatigue. The peasant, who was watching me
narrowly, judged of the truth of my story by the sincerity of my
appetite. All of a sudden, after having said that he saw perfectly
well that I was a good and true young fellow that did not come to
betray him, he opened a little trap-door by the side of his
kitchen, went down and returned a moment afterwards with a good
brown loaf of pure wheat, the remains of a toothsome ham, and a
bottle of wine, the sight of which rejoiced my heart more than all
the rest. To these he added a good thick omelette, and I made such
a dinner as none but a walker ever enjoyed. When it came to pay,
lo! his disquietude and fears again seized him; he would none of my
money, and rejected it with extraordinary manifestations of
disquiet. The funniest part of the matter was, that I could not
conceive what he was afraid of. At length, with fear and trembling,
he pronounced those terrible words, _Commissioners_ and
_Cellar-rats_. He gave me to understand that he concealed his wine
because of the excise, and his bread on account of the tax, and
that he was a lost man if they got the slightest inkling that he
was not dying of hunger. Every thing he said to me touching this
matter, whereof, indeed, I had not the slightest idea, produced an
impression on me that can never be effaced. It became the germ of
that inextinguishable hatred that afterwards sprang up in my heart
against the vexations to which these poor people are subject, and
against their oppressors. This man, though in easy circumstances,
dared not eat the bread he had gained by the sweat of his brow, and
could escape ruin only by presenting the appearance of the same
misery that reigned around him.

A hideously false world, that world of French society was, in Rousseau's
time. The falseness was full ripe to be laid bare by some one; and
Rousseau's experience of life, as well as his temperament and his
genius, fitted him to do the work of exposure that he did. What we
emphatically call cha