may be sure that as the two sides of his character--his notions of
serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort--both went in the
same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired
him towards society did not lessen with increased communication, but
naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy.

Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in
1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which
the good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen
one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the
relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated
with his children. We have heard too the new words with which during
these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax
hot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance
on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was
bearing him.

His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of
finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even
the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the
greatest of the farmers general.[205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay,
his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates
of the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by
all the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it
had also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is
always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community
possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their
highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the
Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, with
independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an
essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable
degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances
by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is
demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a
similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving
the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate
it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on
material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering
osten