The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him than the subtle inhalations of softened and close enveloping companionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectual equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day.

This is not the highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the point of view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned with the conditions of productive energy.

He only sought to live, to be himself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind of nature was the best supplement for his own.

As he said in an apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it,--you never can cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man himself knows anything about it.[124] "By the side of people we love," he says very truly, "sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere.

I lived with my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the universe."[125] Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate than he was with Theresa.