The mother, from a modern
standpoint, was an attractive, highly accomplished, and admirable woman.
In her neighbours' eyes she was not quite Puritanical enough,
high-spirited, independent, adventurous, fond of innocent gaiety, but a
devoted wife when, at last, at the age of thirty, she married. More than
once before marriage she was formally censured by the ecclesiastical
authorities for her little insubordinations, and these may be seen to
have a certain significance when we turn to her father; he was a thorough
_mauvais sujet_, with an incorrigible love of pleasure, and constantly
falling into well-deserved trouble for some escapade with the young women
of Geneva. Thus on both sides there was a certain nervous instability, an
uncontrollable wayward emotionality. But of actual insanity, of nervous
disorder, of any decided abnormality or downright unfitness in either
father or mother, not a sign. Isaac Rousseau and Susanne Bernard would
have been passed by the most ferocious eugenist. It is again a case in
which the chances of convergent heredity have produced a result which in
its magnitude, in its heights and in its depths, none could foresee. It
is one of the most famous and most accurately known examples of insane
genius in history, and we see what amount of support it offers to the
ponderous dictum concerning the insane heredity of genius.
Let us turn from insanity to grave nervous disease. Epilepsy at once
comes before us, all the more significantly since it has been
considered, more especially by Lombroso, to be the special disease
through which genius peculiarly manifests itself.
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