FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151  
152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   >>   >|  
may be sure that as the two sides of his character--his notions of serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort--both went in the same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired him towards society did not lessen with increased communication, but naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy. Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in 1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which the good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated with his children. We have heard too the new words with which during these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax hot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was bearing him. His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the greatest of the farmers general.[205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay, his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates of the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by all the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it had also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, with independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering osten
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151  
152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
Madame
 

circle

 

notions

 

Epinay

 

relations

 
society
 
people
 

social

 
Versailles
 

financiers


Parisian

 

thrust

 
highest
 

strain

 
marked
 

artificiality

 
quality
 
sentimentalism
 

hollow

 

characteristics


possessing

 

specially

 

community

 

countenance

 

craving

 

despise

 

necessity

 

ignoble

 

existence

 

beginning


similar

 
humiliate
 

Besides

 

maintaining

 

opulence

 
coarse
 

glittering

 
material
 

obvious

 
position

resting
 

demoralised

 
plutocracy
 
essentially
 

reason

 

aristocracy

 
respect
 

normal

 
independent
 

traditions