but what was obliging and civil in the curiosity of which I was the object.  I was steeled against all their gibes, but their caressing air, which I had not expected, overcame me so completely, that I trembled like a child when things began.  I heard all about me a whispering of women who seemed to me as beautiful as angels, and who said to one another below their breath, ’This is charming, this is enchanting:  there is not a note that does not appeal to the heart.’  The, pleasure of causing emotion in so many lovable persons moved me myself to tears.”

The emotions of the eighteenth century were vivid and easily roused; fastening upon everything without any earnest purpose, and without any great sense of responsibility, it grew as hot over a musical dispute as over the gravest questions of morality or philosophy.  Grimm had attacked French music, Rousseau supported his thesis by a Lettre sur la Musique.  It was the moment of the great quarrel between the Parliament and the clergy.  “When my letter appeared, there was no more excitement save against me,” says Rousseau; “it was such that the nation has never recovered from it.  When people read that this pamphlet probably prevented a revolution in the state, they will fancy they must be dreaming.”  And Grimm adds in his correspondence:  “The Italian actors who have been playing for the last ten months on the stage of the Opera de Paris and who are called here bouffons, have so absorbed the attention of Paris that the Parliament, in spite of all its measures and proceedings which should have earned it celebrity, could not but fall into complete oblivion.  A wit has said that the arrival of Manelli saved us from a civil war; and Jean Jacques Rousseau of Geneva, whom his friends have dubbed the citizen of citizens (le citoyen par excellence), that eloquent and bilious foe of the sciences, has just set fire to the four corners of Paris with a Lettre sur la Musique, in which he proves that it is impossible to set French words to music. . . .  What is not easy to believe, and is none the less true for all that, is that M. Rousseau was afraid of being banished for this pamphlet.  It would have been odd to see Rousseau banished for having spoken ill of French music, after having with impunity dealt with the most delicate political matter.”

Rousseau had just printed his Discours sur l’Inegalite des conditions, a new and violent picture of the corruptions of human society.  “Inequality being almost nil in a state of nature,” he says, “it derives its force and increment from the development of our faculties and from the progress of the human mind . . . according to the poet it is gold and silver, but according to the philosopher it is iron and corn which have civilized men and ruined the human race.”