had all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh
impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.

One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so
much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of
its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century.
One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site
which he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant,
half dead with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing
more restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently,
after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a
small trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some
meat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then
he explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none
of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on
account of the duties, and his bread on account of the _taille_, and
declared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was not
dying of hunger. All this made an impression on Rousseau which he never
forgot. "Here," he says, "was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred
which afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harass
the common people, and against all their oppressors. This man actually
did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow,
and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned
around him."[67]

It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company,
that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old