city of the old. Three generations in a direct line separated Jean
Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the
first emigrant.[1] Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family
dates from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have
exerted the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction
with the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens
of the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians
that out of three thousand families who composed the population of
Geneva towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly
fifty who before the Reformation had acquired the position of
burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus planted a colony
of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with a new doctrine and
newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of character and
manners. People declared they could recognise in the men of Geneva
neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss
gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in government,
a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries, which marked
them with a stamp unlike that of any other community.[2] Towards the
close of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and rudeness
was sensibly modified under the influence of the great neighbouring
monarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the rapid
decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use. The movement had not gone
far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners and
spirit of his country their special quality and individual note.

The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful,
and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden
name, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most
touching and pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit
beginning of a life preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. "I cost my