Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that we easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau.  When we are most ready to fling up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness and sophistry, some trait is at hand to revive moral interest in him, and show him unlike common men, reverent of truth and human dignity.  There is a slight anecdote of this kind connected with his visit to Fontainebleau.  The day after the representation of his piece, he happened to be taking his breakfast in some public place.  An officer entered, and, proceeding to describe the performance of the previous day, told at great length all that had happened, depicted the composer with much minuteness, and gave a circumstantial account of his conversation.  In this story, which was told with equal assurance and simplicity, there was not a word of truth, as was clear from the fact that the author of whom he spoke with such intimacy sat unknown and unrecognised before his eyes.  The effect on Rousseau was singular enough.  “The man was of a certain age; he had no coxcombical or swaggering air; his expression bespoke a man of merit, and his cross of St. Lewis showed that he was an old officer.  While he was retailing his untruths, I grew red in the face, I lowered my eyes, I sat on thorns; I tried to think of some means of believing him to have made a mistake in good faith.  At length trembling lest some one should recognise me and confront him, I hastened to finish my chocolate without saying a word; and stooping down as I passed in front of him, I went out as fast as possible, while the people present discussed his tale.  I perceived in the street that I was bathed in sweat, and I am sure that if any one had recognised me and called me by name before I got out, they would have seen in me the shame and embarrassment of a culprit, simply from a feeling of the pain the poor man would have had to suffer if his lie had been discovered."[231] One who can feel thus vividly humiliated by the meanness of another, assuredly has in himself the wholesome salt of respect for the erectness of his fellows; he has the rare sentiment that the compromise of integrity in one of them is as a stain on his own self-esteem, and a lowering of his own moral stature.  There is more deep love of humanity in this than in giving many alms, and it was not the less deep for being the product of impulse and sympathetic emotion, and not of a logical sorites.

Another scene in a cafe is worth referring to, because it shows in the same way that at this time Rousseau’s egoism fell short of the fatuousness to which disease or vicious habit eventually depraved it.  In 1752 he procured the representation of his comedy of Narcisse, which he had written at the age of eighteen, and which is as well worth reading or playing as most comedies by youths of that amount of experience of the ways of the world and the heart of man.  Rousseau was amazed and touched by the indulgence of the public,