octrinating, at another amusing its
hosts, but everywhere young, active, confident, recruiting and battling
everywhere, penetrating and fascinating the whole of society " [M.
Guizot, Madame la comtesse de Rumford]. Rousseau never took his place in
this circle; in this society he marched in front like a pioneer of new
times, attacking tentatively all that he encountered on his way. "Nobody
was ever at one and the same time more factious and more dictatorial," is
the clever dictum of M. Saint Marc Girardin.

Rousseau was not a Frenchman: French society always felt that, in
consequence of certain impressions of his early youth which were never to
be effaced. Born at Geneva on the 28th of June, 1712, in a family of the
lower middle class, and brought up in the first instance by an
intelligent and a pious mother, he was placed, like Voltaire and Diderot,
in an attorney's office. Dismissed with disgrace "as good for nothing
but to ply the file," the young man was bound apprentice to an engraver,
"a clownish and violent fellow," says Rousseau, "who succeeded very
shortly in dulling all the brightness of my boyhood, brutalizing my
lively and loving character, and reducing me in spirit, as I was in
fortune, to my real position of an apprentice."

Rousseau was barely sixteen when he began that roving existence which is
so attractive to young people, so hateful in ripe age, and which lasted
as long as his life. Flying from his master whose brutality he dreaded,
and taking refuge at Oharmettes in Savoy with a woman whom he at first
loved passionately, only to leave her subsequently with disgust, he had
reached the age of one and twenty, and had already gone through many
adventures when he set out, heart-sore and depraved, to seek at Paris a
means of subsistence. He had invented a new system of musical notation;
the Academy of Sciences, which had lent him a favorable ear, did not
consider the discovery useful. Some persons had taken an interest in
him, but Rousseau could never keep his friends; and he had many, zealous
and devoted. He was sent to Venice as secretary to the French ambassador
M. de Montaigu. He soon quarrelled with the ambassador and returned to
Paris. He found his way into the house of Madame Dupin, wife of a rich
farmer-general (of taxes). He was considered clever; he wrote little
plays, which he set to music. Enthusiastically welcomed by the friends
of Madame Dupin, he contributed to their amusements.