[62] While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a
room which had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau
(_b. 1670--d. 1741_), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on
counting the first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau,
Pierre [_b. 1725--d. 1785_], who wrote plays and did other work now
well forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly commemorative of the
trio--

Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme, Connus de Paris jusqu'à Rome,
Sont différens; voici par où; Rousseau de Paris fut grand homme;
Rousseau de Genève est un fou; Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.

Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire,
Jan. 30, 1750. _Corr._, i. 145.

[63] The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the
great Roman structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. _Conf._, vi. 446.

[64] Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to
Chambéri, after his first visit to Paris [_Conf._, v. 305], and the
only objection to this is his mention of the incident of the march of
the French troops, which could not have happened until the winter of
1733, as having taken place "some months" after his arrival.
Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the return in the
spring of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is this: Returns
from Turin towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until the
spring of 1731; passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuchâtel; first visits
Paris in spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732.
But a precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions is
impossible; Rousseau wrote them three and thirty years after our