ears of men.[60] Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars,
but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did not lack
either hope or charity. "How is it," Rousseau cried, many years after
this, "that having found so many good people in my youth, I find so few
in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No; but the class in
which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in which I found
them then. Among the common people, where great passions only speak at
intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard oftener. In
the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the mask of
sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks."[61]

From Lausanne he went to Neuchâtel, where he had more success, for,
teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was marked
enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles
falling in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing
Europe in search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy
Sepulchre, he at once attached himself to him in the capacity of
interpreter. In this position he remained for a few weeks, until the
French minister at Soleure took him away from the Greek monk, and
despatched him to Paris to be the attendant of a young officer.[62] A
few days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, and
which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all other
wonders disappointed them,[63] convinced him that here was not what he
sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame de
Warens and more familiar lands.

The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
which we may date in the summer of 1732,[64] was always counted by
Rousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem
grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of