Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2) — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair hair and
large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that he was
one of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While at
Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and benevolent
priest,[52] and uniting the two good men thirty years after he conceived
and drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar.[53]
Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil
was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in
intellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau
ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was
one of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not
only the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the
temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain local
impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the old
transports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent
Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps
of the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass,
nor a fair little abbé who played the violin in the choir.[54] Yet he
was in so dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his
good-will nor his assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, not
even music. His teacher, one Le Mâitre, belonged to that great class of
irregular and disorderly natures with which Rousseau's destiny, in the
shape of an irregular and disorderly temperament of his own, so
constantly brought him into contact. Le Mâitre could not work without
the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his passion for his art landed
him a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon him by the precentor of
the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and left Annecy in a furtive
manner along with Rousseau, whom the too comprehensive solicitude of
Madame de Warens despatched to bear him company. They went together as
far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician happened to fall into an
epileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for help, informed the
crowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a moment when no one was
thinking about him, turned the street corner and finally disappeared,
the musician being thus "abandoned by the only friend on whom he had a
right to count."[55] It thus appears that a man maybe exquisitely moved
by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the fairness of smiling
gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a qualm of misgiving of
leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange place. It has ceased
to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are done by people with
an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature. At the
moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and Madame de
Warens. "It is not," he says in words of profound warning, which many
men have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy dawn that