117] It is pleasanter
to think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which
ten years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that
French melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A
Venetian experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less
weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which
persuaded him that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who had
never heard any music was invited to listen first of all to a French
monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in the
Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the performance of the
French piece. The first notes of the Italian were no sooner struck, than
his eyes and whole expression softened; he was enchanted, surrendered
his whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the music, and could
never again be induced to listen to the performance of any
French air.[118]

More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the
defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind
to political speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a
book that was to be called Institutions Politiques.[119] The work, as
thus designed and named, was never written, but the idea of it, after
many years of meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality,
and then in the Social Contract.

If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in
his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event
which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by
came to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but
which he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven
permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him
to bear his many sore burdens.[120]

He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the
Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in
Paris.[121] Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who
used to sit at table with her mistress and the guests of the house. The
company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abbes, and
other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come
neither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the
conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her
serving-woman gave a zest to her own licen