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 slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness.