insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with
respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too
much not to beat you at chess always."[5] A few days after, the
vanquished prince sent him a present of game which Rousseau duly
accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote to
Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he loved
the prince's conversation better than his gifts.[6] He admits that
this was an ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game "from a
prince of the blood who throws such good feeling into the present, is
not so much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his
independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not
know his place."[7] Considering the extreme virulence with which
Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind from his
friends, one may perhaps find some inconsistency in this condemnation
of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on all other
occasions. If the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is
allowed to modify the quality of the donation, that is hardly a
defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame de
Boufflers,[8] the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet more
intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judicious warning
when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a charge of
affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue and
so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus would have accepted such
marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their
disinterestedness and frugality."[9] Perhaps there is a flutter of
self-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, in
the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at the
castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who was
his neighbour and his friend.[10] On the whole, however, and so far as
we know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily with these high