llen desperate man. He
takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of
his principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law
as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so
attached to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. "Do not
suppose," he says, with superlative gravity, "that you have seduced me
by your reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not your
justification. I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardly
approve it yourself; and so long as you both of you continue dear to me,
I will never leave you in careless security as to the innocence of your
state. Yet love such as yours deserves considerateness.... I feel
respect for a union so tender, and cannot bring myself to attempt to
lead it to virtue along the path of despair" (p. 401).

Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from
appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to
virtue along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much
as he could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense.
Saint Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a
certain manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which his
correspondent only felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lambert
took all the blame on himself. He had desired that his mistress and his
friend should love one another; then he thought he saw some coolness in
his mistress, and he set the change down to his friend, though not on
the true grounds. "Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a
traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken to
me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found hard to
bear." In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being
over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a
connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or
religion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had
ceased to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might be
spared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and
conscience in so austere an adviser.[283]

It is well known how effectively one with a germ of good principle in
him is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in
his hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last
interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lam