"I began to feel," he says, at a date of sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, "that she was no longer for me what she had been in our happy years, and I felt it all the more clearly as I was still the same towards her."[131] This was in 1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference more open, until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had proposed a separation from him.

What the exact reasons for this gradual change may have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of the whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just.

There are two good traits recorded of the woman's character.

She could never console herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days miserably in a house of charity.[132] And the repudiation of her children, against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled, remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived.

We may suppose that there was that about household life with Rousseau which might have bred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was.