makes close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom of
faculty and completeness of work. There is a certain close and sickly
air round all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them. We
seem to move not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the
fiery flames of lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of
things not wholesome or manly. "I know a sentiment," he writes, "which
is perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more
delicious, which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very often
apart from it. Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is more
voluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of the same sex
could be its object; at least I have been a friend, if ever man was, and
I never felt this about any of my friends."[38] He admits that he can
only describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly
ruled by elements that defy definition, and in Rousseau's case the
sentiment which he could not describe was a paramount trait of his
mental constitution. It was as a voluptuous garment; in it his
imagination was cherished into activity, and protected against that
outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but benumbs and
disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation as
Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his
character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was
the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity.

When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread
and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the
sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of
manhood. This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights,
was banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by the
influence of a person who is one of the most striking types to be found
in the gallery of fair women.