1 84 ROUSSEAU. 



it must be admitted, there are. One has been noted 

 respecting his age when he committed the great crime 

 against his fellow-servant at Turin ; though this is 

 rather apparent than real, inasmuch as he himself has 

 furnished the means of detection. But the ' Corre- 

 spondence' frequently indicates suppressions in the ' Con- 

 fessions,' especially his letter 1732 to his father, and 

 1735 to his aunt; for he there speaks of grave faults 

 which he had committed, and of which the ' Confes- 

 sions' give no intimation. It is also certain both that 

 his friends represent his manner of living with Theresa 

 differently from himself, and that his letter to her 

 after their marriage gives an idea of her wholly differ- 

 ent from that conveyed by the ' Memoirs.'- -The story 

 of the attack upon his house at Neufchatel, too, is 

 quite a fiction, and must have been, by the evidence of 

 1'Eschery, a wilful one. The account of his bold and 

 resolute conduct towards Count de Montaigue, at 

 Venice, is probably much exaggerated. Nothing can be 

 more unlike the rest of his life ; and his letters to the 

 Foreign Department omit every portion of it, though 

 they are very full on all the other circumstances.* 

 The letter he wrote to Voltaire, too, in 1765, saying 

 he was " an impudent liar" if he represented him as 

 having been a servant instead of Secretary of Embassy 

 at Venice, seems somewhat too strong, when we find 

 him, in his own letters to the Foreign Department, 

 plainly calling himself, over and over again, a "domes- 



* Compare Conf., Part ii., lib. vii. (QEuv., i. 299), and Corresp., 

 i. (CEuv., vii.) 



