CHAPTER IV.
THERESA LE VASSEUR.
Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delight perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, or even to perceive that life has gone out of it.

The sight of simple hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former days into a present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching enough.
But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in which Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his embarrassment with some composure.

One cannot easily think of him as a simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons.
His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abbe of the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac (1714-80).
The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has ever been written, was not successful in the practical and far more arduous side of that master art.[104] We have seen how little training he had ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all who have to shape young minds for a humane life.

So long as all went well, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to confess that he was a devil.

When his two pupils could not understand him, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of the disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, human excellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was ready to kill them.