There was no social disparity between the two.
She was a person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he.
And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the arithmetical table.

Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be, it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his partnership--and many others as well as he are said to have found in this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,--Rousseau had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding.

Granting that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from beginning to end entirely voluntary?
If he attached himself deliberately to an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break on any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as much due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as to the character of Theresa Le Vasseur?
Nothing, as he himself said in a passage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the true leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachments which he forms.[127] It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this particular way.

Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer persons.

He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not have been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in the eighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a kitchen wench.