When the end of the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, he
tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on
him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and
grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her
client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not
magical.[31] Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural
fury of an Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any
other cause than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds.

The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of
princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey
or footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he
passed three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here
was marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful
discussion. When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured
ribbon was missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his
possession. They asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that it
had been given to him by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house.
In her presence and before the whole household he repeated his false
story, and clung to it with a bitter effrontery that we may well call
diabolic, remembering how the nervous terror of punishment and exposure
sinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, really
denotes in the young an excruciating physical struggle, often so keen
that the victim clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity
and cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined
sensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and at
this epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded his
apprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towards
degeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was the