eful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even
occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the
morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People of
a certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for
bare love of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to
feel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a
woman who to everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with
the bulk of his fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and
confirm his conviction that they are all in the wrong, by preserving
attachment to some one to whom general opinion is hostile; the private
argument being that if he is capable of this degree of virtue and
friendship in an unfavourable case, how much more could he have
practised it with others, if they would only have allowed him. Whether
this kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau could
always refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady
kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among the most
odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother
had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes, including
that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he bore with
them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur until she
had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity and
lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.

In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a
change in her affections. "I began to feel," he says, at a date of
sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, "that she was no
longer for me what she had been in our happy years, and I felt it all
the more clearly as I was still the same towards her."[131] This was in
1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference more open,
until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had proposed a
separation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual change may
have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of the
whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are two
good traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never console
herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days
miserably in a house of charity.[132] And the repudiation of her
children, against which the glowing egoism of maternity always