It really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to the gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of religious unction.
In 1761 the Marechale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau's children, but without success.

They were gone beyond hope of identification, and the author of _Emitius_ and his sons and daughters lived together in this world, not knowing one another.

Rousseau with singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him.

"The success of your search," he wrote, "could not give me pure and undisturbed pleasure; it is too late, too late....

In my present condition this search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; and considering the too easily yielding character of the person in question, it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or for evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of a nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing.