The paradox was too strange for Rousseau's contemporaries. They could
not understand him. His works were highly popular; he was received into
the most brilliant circles in Paris; he made friends with the most
eminent men of the day; and then ensued misunderstandings, accusations,
quarrels, and at last complete disaster. Rousseau vanished from society,
driven out, according to his account, by the treacheries of his friends;
the victim, according to their account, of his own petty jealousies and
morbid suspicions. At every point in the quarrel, his friends, and such
great and honest men as Diderot and Hume were among them, seem to have
been in the right; but it seems no less clear that they were too anxious
to proclaim and emphasize the faults of a poor, unfortunate, demented
man. We can hardly blame them; for, in their eyes, Rousseau appeared as
a kind of mad dog--a pest to society, deserving of no quarter. They did
not realize--they _could_ not--that beneath the meanness and the frenzy
that were so obvious to them was the soul of a poet and a seer. The
wretched man wandered for long in Switzerland, in Germany, in England,
pursued by the ever-deepening shadows of his maniacal suspicions. At
last he returned to France, to end his life, after years of lingering
misery, in obscurity and despair.


Rousseau and Voltaire both died in 1778--hardly more than ten years
before the commencement of the Revolution. Into that last decade of the
old régime there seemed to be concentrated all the ardour, all the hope,
all the excitement, all the brilliance of the preceding century. Had not
Reason and Humanity triumphed at last? Triumphed, at any rate, in
spirit; for who was not converted? All that remained now was the final,
quick, easy turn which would put into action the words of the
philosophers and make this earth a paradise. And still new visions kept
opening out before the eyes of enthusiasts--strange speculations and