tation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both
serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative
manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness
within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most
distasteful scene that any collected spirit can witness.

Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her
stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in
Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers,
and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know,
were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred
francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the
first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the
second he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting.
His comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it
brought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some
five and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, "the
interlude, which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as
much money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of
meditation and three years of composition."[206] Before the arrival of
this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the
post of cashier in that important department, and Rousseau attended for
some weeks to receive the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy
as usual, and the complexities of accounts were as little congenial to
him as notarial complexities had been three and twenty years previously.
It is, however, one of the characteristics of times of national break-up
not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at
the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as
liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief going on
a short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the
moment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the
watchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted
Rousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him to
be the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of very
painful illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six months
he would be in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of
his tem