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
Thérèse, 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 paradoxes with which his
writings abound,--even in one of his letters appealing for pity because
he "had never known the sweetness of a father's embrace." With
extraordinary self-conceit, too, he looked upon himself, all the while,
in his numerous illicit loves, as a paragon of virtue, being apparently
without any moral sense or perception of moral distinctions.

It was not till Rousseau was thirty-nine years of age that he attracted
public attention by his writings, although earlier known in literary
circles,--especially in that infidel Parisian _coterie_, where Diderot,
Grimm, D'Holbach, D'Alembert, David Hume, the Marquis de Mirabeau,
Helvetius, and other wits shined, in which circle no genius was
acknowledged and no profundity of thought was deemed possible unless
allied with those pagan ideas which Saint Augustine had exploded and
Pascal had ridiculed. Even while living among these people, Rousseau had