during which Rousseau's talent as a musician was developed. From
eighteen to twenty he led a wandering life--"starved, feasted,
despaired, was happy." Rejoining Madame de Warens at Chambery in 1732,
he interested himself in music, physics, botany, and was more and
more drawn towards the study of letters. He methodised his reading
(1738-41), and passionately pursued a liberal system of
self-education, literary, scientific, and philosophical.

Rousseau's relations with his _bonne maman_, Madame de Warens, had
been troubled by the latest of her other loves. In 1741 he set off
for Paris, bearing with him the manuscript of a new system of musical
notation, which was offered to the Academie des Sciences, and was
declared neither new nor useful for instrumentalists. An experiment
in life as secretary to the French Ambassador at Venice closed, after
fourteen months, with his abrupt dismissal. Again in Paris, Rousseau
obtained celebrity by his operas and comedies, was received in the
_salons_, and associated joyously with Diderot, Marmontel, and Grimm.
He arranged his domestic life by taking an illiterate and vulgar
drudge, Therese Le Vasseur, for his companion; their children were
abandoned to the care of the Foundling Hospital.

In 1749 Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes. Rousseau, on the road
to visit his friend, read in the _Mercure de France_ that the Academy
of Dijon had proposed as the subject for a prize to be awarded next
year the question, "Has the progress of arts and sciences contributed
to purify morals?" Suddenly a tumult of ideas arose in his brain and
overwhelmed him; it was an ecstasy of the intellect and the passions.
With Diderot's encouragement he undertook his indictment of
civilisation; in 1750 the _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_
was crowned. In accordance with his theory he proceeded to simplify
his own life, intensifying his self-consciousness by singularities
of assumed austerity, and playing the part (not wholly a fictitious
one) of a moral reformer. Famous as author of the _Discours_ and the
opera _Le Devin de Village_, presented before the King, he returned
to his native Switzerland, and there re-entered the Protestant
communion. In 1754 he again competed for a prize at Dijon, on the
question, "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it
authorised by the law of nature?" Rousseau failed to obtain the prize,
but the _Discours sur l'Inegalite_ was published (1755) with a
dedication