He was both too self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147] but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage.

What happened appears to have been this.

Seated at table with Theresa and two guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his wife.

"This good and seemly engagement was contracted," he says, "in all the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of two men of worth and honour....

During the short and simple act, I saw the honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that are married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy ceremony names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed, since I recognise no other.