h would one day have made
him rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult
as the application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this
greater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men
value the money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary
reform in truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing
peruke was substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and
white stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular
thought that he would never again need to know the time. One sacrifice
remained to be made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had
been a large stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular
affection, for both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal
cleanliness, as he had for corporeal wholesomeness. He was seasonably
delivered from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without. One
Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerable
quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be the
brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the treasure,
leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of coarser
stuffs.[209]

We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the
beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion
which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary
power which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. "It
takes," wrote Diderot, "right above the clouds; never was such a
success."[210] We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental
sincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him of
his power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and
disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon
himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed
independence. Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world was
worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satirist
does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, but
from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity
of life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy us. "When my
destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society," he wrote in his last
meditation on the course of his own life, "I found nothing there to
give a moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure