was now about to enter a new school, very conducive to such life, the school of experience, which, as Jean Paul says, is an excellent schoolmistress, though the fees are rather high.

In turning his face to Paris, Rousseau meant to win distinction and fortune as a musician. He had made considerable progress in musical knowledge and even aspired to be a composer. The idea of literary authorship had hardly yet dawned upon him. On his way he stopped at Lyons, where he obtained several letters of introduction, and had a momentary, but violent, love-spasm, which, however, did not detain him. "I reached Paris," he says, "in the autumn of 1741, with fifteen louis of ready money in my pocket, my comedy Narcisse, and my musical project as my sole resources. Having, therefore, no time to lose, I made haste to take advantage of my letters of introduction." He was well received. His "musical project," which was nothing less than a new system of musical notation, was presented to the Academy of Sciences, but failed to meet with the recognition he had expected. His Narcisse, though praised by Fontenelle and Diderot, with whom, among other notabilities, he had become intimate, was not then brought on the stage. He consequently relapsed, with a kind of desperate delight, into his habitual indolence, and would soon have been reduced to abject poverty, had not a wise Jesuit father advised him to try his fortune with the ladies. He did so, and, notwithstanding his incurable awkwardness and rusticity of manner, and his fatal habit of making effusive love to every woman he met, no matter what her

rank or age, he was able, through one of his patronesses, Madame de Broglie, to obtain a situation as secretary to a recently appointed ambassador to Venice, the Comte de Montaigu. In this position, which brought him in contact with diplomatic and political life in a word, with the "great world"— for the first time, he seems to have conducted himself with energy and firmness, though not always with prudence, and he retained it for eighteen months. He finally quarrelled with the ambassador, who was an incompetent, negligent coxcomb, and returned to France - without his salary. For a long time all his endeavors to obtain this were in vain a fact which made a deep impression on him. "The injustice and uselessness," he says, "of my complaints left in my soul a germ of indignation against our stupid civil institutions, in which the true good of the public and real justice are always sacrificed to some indefinable, apparent order, in reality destructive of all order, and merely adding the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong." And this was not the only profound impression made on him by his sojourn in Venice. In his official life, he learnt the hollowness and corruption of diplomacy and officialism; in his private life, in which he saw much of the seamy side of Venice, he came to close quarters with forms of depravity that disgusted even his not over-healthy sensuality, and touched his better nature. He returned from "the most immoral of cities" a somewhat sobered and reflective man,1

1 A letter which he wrote to a lady who received him badly on his return, because he had dared to quarrel with an ambassador,

and, what is more, with a little sense of his own personal dignity as a man.

On his return to Paris, Rousseau resumed his Bohemian life. For a short time he lived with a much-admired Spanish friend; but, on his departure, desiring to enjoy entire independence, he moved to a little inn near the Luxembourg, meaning to resume his musical studies and composition. His landlady was a woman of the coarsest sort, and most of the guests, Irish or Gascons, were like her, Rousseau being the only decent person among them! They were waited upon by a poor, hard-working girl, named Thérèse Le Vasseur, from Orleans, who soon became the butt of all the coarse ribaldry of the house. Rousseau alone took her part; a sympathy sprang up between them, which soon passed into what he called love, and in a few days the exsecretary of the Venetian embassy, wishing to find a successor to his "mamma," as he says, made the poor creature his wife, in all but the name. He promised never to abandon her, and never to marry her, and he kept his word to his dying day, from 1744 to 1778. There is no accounting for tastes; and there is no doubt that Rousseau found in his Thérèse, who had

reveals his state of mind at this time. Here are some extracts: "I am sorry, madam; I have made a mistake. I thought you just: I ought to have remembered that you are noble. I ought to have felt that it is unbecoming in me, a plebeian, to make claims against a gentleman. Have I ancestors, titles? Is equity without parchment equity?".. "If he [the ambassador] has no dignity of soul, it is because his nobility enables him to be without it; if he is hand in glove with all that is filthiest in the most immoral of cities; if he is the chum of pickpockets; if he is one himself, it is because his ancestors had honor instead of him."

few personal charms, and who could never tell the time on a clock-face, remember the order of the months, or give change for a franc, what was permanently congenial to his sensuous, indolent nature. What he wanted was not stimulation or intellectual companionship, but steady, unexacting affection, and the thousand little soothing attentions that are quite compatible with gross stupidity. These he found, and his loyalty to her through all changes of fortune, amid good and evil repute, is perhaps the noblest trait in his whole life. What mattered it to him that other persons saw in her only coarseness and greed? he was content. "In the presence of those we love," he says, "feeling nourishes the intelligence, as well as the heart, and there is no need to go elsewhere in quest of ideas. I lived with my Thérèse as agreeably as with the finest genius in the world." . . . "I saw that she loved me sincerely, and this redoubled my tenderness. This intimacy took the place of everything for me. The future did not touch me, or touched me only as the present prolonged. I desired only to insure its duration. This attachment rendered all other sorts of dissipation superfluous and insipid. I went out only to visit Thérèse: her home became almost mine."

Rousseau's relation to Thérèse did one thing, at least, for him; it steadied him, and gave him peace to work. So he toiled away at musical composition, and tried, through his friends, to bring his work before the public, but without success. Discouraged at last, and having to provide, not only for himself, but also for Thérèse and her whole family, he attached

an event

himself, in a somewhat nondescript capacity, to certain wealthy patrons, who gave him a small salary. With these he passed the autumn of 1747 at the castle of Chenonceau, on the Cher, in great luxury; but, when he returned, a great surprise awaited him. His Thérèse was about to give birth to a child for which he was not at all prepared. And here the worst side of his character, his utter want of any sense of moral responsibility and natural affection, came to the surface. As soon as the child was born, it was sent, despite the heartbroken remonstrances of the mother, to the foundling hospital, and was never again seen or recognized by its parents. We may anticipate somewhat, by adding that four other children, born to them later, all shared the same fate. With all his gushing sentimentality and sensuous sympathy, Rousseau recoiled from the tenderest, sweetest, and most sacred of all human duties, the nurture and training of his own offspring. Speaking of the exposure of his second child, he says: "Not a bit more reflection on my part; not a bit more approval on the part of the mother. She groaned and obeyed." And this was the man who could not see her gibed by the Irish and Gascon abbés!

About this time, Rousseau became acquainted with Madame d'Épinay and Mademoiselle de Bellegarde, afterwards Comtesse d'Houdetot, both of whom were destined to play important parts in his life. Now also, mainly through his connection with the Abbé Condillac and Diderot, he began to think of literary composition, and planned a periodical to be called Le Persifleur, which, luckily, never saw the light. He