We may imagine how little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and ill-smelling fellow-workers.[68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any set of circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them.
So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular and grotesque endeavours.

Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a possible thing were not his.

He was pleased at his lessons while there, but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the fixing of an hour.

In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the same end as all the others.

He next rushed to Besancon in search of the musical instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage was confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.[69] Finally he abandoned the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow resources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly indefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite and miscellaneous affairs,--if we are here, as so often, to give the name of affairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road to ruin.
The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing.