r, cost him no conscientious
scruples, for his religious training had been of the slimmest, and
principles he had none.

We next see Rousseau as a footman in the service of an Italian Countess,
where he was mean enough to accuse a servant girl of a theft he had
himself committed, thereby causing her ruin. Again, employed as a
footman in the service of another noble family, his extraordinary
talents were detected, and he was made secretary. But all this kindness
he returned with insolence, and again became a wanderer. In his
isolation he sought the protection of the Swiss lady who had before
befriended him, Madame de Warens. He began as her secretary, and ended
in becoming her lover. In her house he saw society and learned music.

A fit of caprice induced Rousseau to throw up this situation, and he
then taught music in Chambery for a living, studied hard, read Voltaire,
Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Leibnitz, and Puffendorf, and evinced an
uncommon vivacity and talent for conversation, which made him a favorite
in social circles. His chief labor, however, for five years was in
inventing a system of musical notation, which led him to Lyons, and
then, in 1741, to Paris.

He was now twenty-nine years old,--a visionary man, full of schemes,
with crude opinions and unbounded self-conceit, but poor and unknown,--a
true adventurer, with many agreeable qualities, irregular habits, and
not very scrupulous morals. Favored by letters of introduction to ladies
of distinction,--for he was a favorite with ladies, who liked his
enthusiasm, freshness, elegant talk, and grand sentiments,--he succeeded
in getting his system of musical notation examined, although not
accepted, by the French Academy, and secured an appointment as
secretary in the suite of the Ambassador to Venice.

In this city Rousseau remained but a short time, being disgusted with
what he called "official insolence," which did not properly recognize
native genius. He returned to Paris as poor as when he left it, and
lived in a cheap restaurant. There he made the acquaintance of his
Therese, a healthy, amiable woman, but low, illiterate, unappreciative,
and coarse, the author of many of his subsequent miseries. She lived
with him till he died,--at first as his mistress and housekeeper,
although later in life he married her. She was the mother of his five
children, every one of whom he sent to a foundling hospital, justifying
his inhumanity by those sophistries and paradox