and dingy canvas with beauty, sportiveness, and pensive grace. Poor
charming woman! Had she not met that wandering boy on the highway; had
she not opened to him her house and heart, his sensitive and suffering
genius might have been extinguished in the mire. The meeting seemed
like the effect of chance, but it was predestination meeting the great
man under the form of his first love. That woman saved him; she
cultivated him; she excited him in solitude, in liberty, and in love,
as the houris of the East through pleasure raise up martyrs in their
young votaries. She gave him his dreamy imagination, his almost
feminine soul, his tender accents, his passion for nature. Her pensive
fancy imparted to him enthusiasm,--the enthusiasm of women, of young
men, of lovers, of all the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy of his day.
She gave him the world, and he proved ungrateful.... She gave him fame,
and he bequeathed opprobrium.... But posterity should be grateful to
them, and forgive a weakness that gave us the prophet of liberty. When
Rousseau wrote those odious pages against his benefactress, he was no
longer Rousseau, he was a poor madman. Who knows if his morbid and
disordered imagination, which made him at that time see an insult in
every benefit and hatred in all friendship, did not show him likewise
the courtesan in the loving woman, and wantonness instead of love? I
have always suspected it. I defy any rational man to recompose, with a
semblance of probability, the character Rousseau gives to the woman he
loved, from the contradictory elements which he describes in her. Those
elements exclude each other: if she had soul enough to adore Rousseau,
she did not at the same time love Claude Anet; if she grieved for
Claude Anet and Rousseau, she did not love the young hair-dresser. If
she was pious she did not glory in her weakness, but must have deplored
it; if engaging, handsome, and frail, as Rousseau depicts her, she
could not be reduced to look for admirers among the vagrants of the
streets, or on the highways. If she affected devotion with such a life,