41   Fayçal FalaKy Out of Desire’s Excess, a Lover Rousseau between Narcissus and Pygmalion One of the paradoxes of Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue is that the author from whom he so largely borrowed did not really consider himself virtuous. Virtue may mean purity of heart and motive in one’s daily actions, but as Jean-Jacques Rousseau very well knew, it also implied a constant rational struggle against intrinsic passions and appetites. It is for this reason that in several parts of the Dialogues, Rousseau por- trays himself paradoxically as a virtuous man who lacks virtue. “But is there some virtue in that sweetness? None. here is only the inclination of a loving and tender nature [. . .] his very reasonable choice isn’t made by either reason or will. It is the work of the pure instinct. It lacks the merit of virtue, doubtless, but neither does it have its instability. One who has surrendered only to the impulses of nature for sixty years is certainly never going to resist them” ( RJJ 150).1 It is not diicult to see why Rousseau would characterize himself as such. If, as Saint-Preux warns Julie, “virtue is a state of war” (J 560), belief in this struggle would mean recognizing our inherent disposition to sin and refuting, as a result, one of Jean-Jacques’s principal tenets: man’s natural inclination for the good. As Rousseau notes in the irst pages of the Dialogues, “virtue among us oten requires ighting and conquering nature” ( RJJ 10–11). hrough his oeuvre, however, Rousseau does not do away with virtue’s struggle as much as he reframes it and conines it within a realm that is strictly intra- sentimental. Rousseau, in other words, does not need to ight his desire, but rather, without will or volition, it is his desire that does the ighting for him. To understand this point, it is worth considering the depiction Rousseau gives in the Confessions of his peculiar sexual tastes. When describing the punishments he received at the hands of Mlle Lambercier and the kind of sensuality they had aroused, Rousseau makes clear to the reader that his desire was a sort of blessing in disguise, an evil that contained its own remedy. Although he says that with a little more efrontery, his senses would have plunged him “into the most brutal sensuality” ( C 15), Rous- seau describes his sexual desire at once as both appetite and law, as being self- contained in its own zeal: For the present, it is enough for me to have pointed out the origin and irst cause of a penchant that has modiied all my passions, and which, repressing them by