If it were a question of property to be assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that is not our case."[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage according to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words about property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law.

He and Theresa were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,[150] and Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.
* * * * * We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the window of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with "confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul," and that general comfort of sensation which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable condition either of duty done externally or of spiritual growth within.
It is perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of the soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh.
But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the plants of the field with strange and silent stirrings.

It is one of the chief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to be able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most important of all realities.

We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates if we can never forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's if we can only think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we can simply remember that he denied his master.

Our vision is only blindness, if we can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of deep mystic aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to believe that this coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse mate, might yet have many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are haunted by figures rather divine than human.
FOOTNOTES: [104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost sagacious; witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M.
de Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works entitled _Melanges_, pp.