of that; in spite of all this, however, I do not approve of your declaring openly against him, as you are doing, and, thereanent, I need only quote to you your own words:  ‘What will become of the little flock, if it is divided and scattered?’ We do not find that Plato, or Aristotle, or Sophocles, or Euripides, wrote against Diogenes, although Diogenes said something insulting to them all.  Jean Jacques is a sick man with a good deal of wit, and one who only has wit when he has fever; he must neither be cured nor have his feelings hurt.”  Voltaire replied with haughty temper to these wise counsels, and the philosophers remained forever embroiled with Rousseau.

Isolated henceforth by the good as well as by the evil tendencies of his nature, Jean Jacques stood alone against the philosophical circle which he had dropped, as well as against the Protestant or Catholic clergy whose creeds he often offended.  He had just published Le Contrat Social, “The Gospel,”; says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, “of the theory as to the sovereignty of the state representing the sovereignty of the people.”  The governing powers of the time had some presentiment of its danger; they had vaguely comprehended what weapons might be sought therein by revolutionary instincts and interests; their anxiety and their anger as yet brooded silently; the director of publications (de la librairie), M. de Malesherbes, was one of the friends and almost one of the disciples of Rousseau whom he shielded; he himself corrected the proofs of the Emile which Rousseau had just finished.  The book had barely begun to appear, when, on the 8th of June, 1762, Rousseau was awakened by a message from la Marchale de Luxembourg:  the Parliament had ordered Emile to be burned, and its author arrested.  Rousseau took flight, reckoning upon finding refuge at Geneva.  The influence of the French government pursued him thither; the Grand Council condemned Emile.  One single copy had arrived at Geneva it was this which was burned by the hand of the common hangman, nine days after the, burning at Paris in the Place de Greve.  “The Contrat Social has received its whipping on the back of Emile,” was the saying at Geneva.  “At the instigation of M. de Voltaire they have avenged upon me the cause of God,” Jean Jacques declared.

Rousseau rashly put his name to his book; Voltaire was more prudent.  One day, having been imprisoned for some verses which were not his, he had taken the resolution to impudently repudiate the paternity of his own works.  “You must never publish anything under your own name,” he wrote to Helvetius; “La Pucelle was none of my doing, of course.  Master Joly de Fleury will make a fine thing of his requisition; I shall tell him that he is a calumniator, that La Pucelle is his own doing, which he wants to put down to me out of spite.”