agitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air.
The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties
of apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could
only be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and
movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which
nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have
left him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted
sense. A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more
fatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the
stupidity of man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress to
Rousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him
than the subtle inhalations of softened and close enveloping
companionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectual
equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the
thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day. This is not
the highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the point
of view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned
with the conditions of productive energy. He only sought to live, to be
himself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind
of nature was the best supplement for his own. As he said in an
apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it,--you never
can cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man
himself knows anything about it.[124] "By the side of people we love,"
he says very truly, "sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the
heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with
my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the
universe."[125]

Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a
stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of
gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to
think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate
than he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two.
She was a person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he.
And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the
plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the
more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners