pensable quality in all
who have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went
well, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to
confess that he was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand
him, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of
the disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, human
excellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was
ready to kill them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to render
them either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacher
himself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal his
employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in the
secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and some dear
romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of this kind
more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These are
surely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng of
worthier memories.

It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the
deadly drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former
days. "What rendered my present condition insupportable was the
recollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my
fountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt myself born
and who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our
guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping of
my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this
was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears
under all the discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to
quicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in
escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at
Lyons (April, 1740--spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old
haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that
happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his
desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris
to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had
invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the
second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had
become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]

It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him. His