ousseau wrote in the New Heloisa very sagely that you should grant to
the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits that
the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot.
Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather
than to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see.
Honest pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle and
unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity
of emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and
she wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. "His madness must be very strong,"
said Saint Lambert, "since she can perceive it."[276]

Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a
fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion
by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and
garnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered
unseen. In short, such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first
stage marked by ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel. When
a man lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct
appointed by his relations with others, still the reality of such
relations survives. He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save
him either from his own passion, or from some degree of that kinship
with others which instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of brass
around him. Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer
most from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had
innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that
the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious
of having fallen at all.

One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found
Madame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her
cheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter
was carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was
that Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the
viciousness of her relations with her lover.[277] "They have played us
an evil turn," cried Madame d'Houdetot; "they have been unjust to me,
but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what you
ought to be."[278] This was Rousseau's first taste of the ashes of
shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, p