under worse circumstances than the Rabouilleuse. There are
two species of timidity,--the timidity of the mind, and the timidity
of the nerves; a physical timidity, and a moral timidity. The one is
independent of the other. The body may fear and tremble, while the mind
is calm and courageous, or vice versa. This is the key to many moral
eccentricities. When the two are united in one man, that man will be a
cipher all his life; such double-sided timidity makes him what we call
"an imbecile." Often fine suppressed qualities are hidden within that
imbecile. To this double infirmity we may, perhaps, owe the lives of
certain monks who lived in ecstasy; for this unfortunate moral and
physical disposition is produced quite as much by the perfection of the
soul and of the organs, as by defects which are still unstudied.

The timidity of Jean-Jacques came from a certain torpor of his
faculties, which a great teacher or a great surgeon, like Despleins,
would have roused. In him, as in the cretins, the sense of love
had inherited a strength and vigor which were lacking to his mental
qualities, though he had mind enough to guide him in ordinary affairs.
The violence of passion, stripped of the ideal in which most young men
expend it, only increased his timidity. He had never brought himself to
court, as the saying is, any woman in Issoudun. Certainly no young girl
or matron would make advances to a young man of mean stature, awkward
and shame-faced in attitude; whose vulgar face, with its flattened
features and pallid skin, making him look old before his time, was
rendered still more hideous by a pair of large and prominent light-green
eyes. The presence of a woman stultified the poor fellow, who was driven
by passion on the one hand as violently as the lack of ideas, resulting
from his education, held him back on the other. Paralyzed between these
opposing forces, he had not a word to say, and feared to be spoken to,
so much did he dread the obligation of replying. Desire, which usually
sets free the tongue, only petrified his powers of speech. Thus it
happened that Jean-Jacques Rouget was solitary and sought solitude
because there alone he was at his ease.

The doctor had seen, too late for remedy, the havoc wrought in his son's
life by a temperament and a character of this kind. He would have been
glad to get him married; but to do that, he must deliver him over to
an influence that was certain to become tyrannical, and the docto