order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a
deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had
wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept
in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw
the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all
never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them
as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with
their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many,
whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime
elements of the human lot.


III.

It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived
at Chambéri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in
the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had
procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the
government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only
temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk,
who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how
little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight
hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and
ill-smelling fellow-workers.[68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any
set of circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them.
So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by
that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular and
grotesque endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a