he thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime that seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.[33] Thus the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain of his gentle kinswoman’s household melody, preserved the darker side of his history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness.  Rousseau expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would serve as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of another soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution.  We may, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful spirit.  Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at further length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy who happened to grow up into a man of genius.[34]

After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or cellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue, Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese person of quality.  This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him with a certain unusual considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt the narrative.  His son condescended to teach the youth Latin, and Rousseau presumed to entertain a passion for one of the daughters of the house, to whom he paid silent homage in the odd shape of attending to her wants at table with special solicitude.  In this situation he had, or at least he supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimate advancement.  But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure of stability, and Rousseau’s temperament in his youth was the archtype of the mutable.  An old comrade from Geneva visited him,[35] and as almost any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness of imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects, the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues.  His imagination again went over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the streams, began to absorb his whole life.  He recalled with delicious satisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how far more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age and taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay other than as it might please them.  “It would be madness to sacrifice such a piece of good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow, difficult, doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one day be realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of true pleasure and freedom in youth."[36]