The paradox was too strange for Rousseau’s contemporaries.  They could not understand him.  His works were highly popular; he was received into the most brilliant circles in Paris; he made friends with the most eminent men of the day; and then ensued misunderstandings, accusations, quarrels, and at last complete disaster.  Rousseau vanished from society, driven out, according to his account, by the treacheries of his friends; the victim, according to their account, of his own petty jealousies and morbid suspicions.  At every point in the quarrel, his friends, and such great and honest men as Diderot and Hume were among them, seem to have been in the right; but it seems no less clear that they were too anxious to proclaim and emphasize the faults of a poor, unfortunate, demented man.  We can hardly blame them; for, in their eyes, Rousseau appeared as a kind of mad dog—­a pest to society, deserving of no quarter.  They did not realize—­they could not—­that beneath the meanness and the frenzy that were so obvious to them was the soul of a poet and a seer.  The wretched man wandered for long in Switzerland, in Germany, in England, pursued by the ever-deepening shadows of his maniacal suspicions.  At last he returned to France, to end his life, after years of lingering misery, in obscurity and despair.

Rousseau and Voltaire both died in 1778—­hardly more than ten years before the commencement of the Revolution.  Into that last decade of the old regime there seemed to be concentrated all the ardour, all the hope, all the excitement, all the brilliance of the preceding century.  Had not Reason and Humanity triumphed at last?  Triumphed, at any rate, in spirit; for who was not converted?  All that remained now was the final, quick, easy turn which would put into action the words of the philosophers and make this earth a paradise.  And still new visions kept opening out before the eyes of enthusiasts—­strange speculations and wondrous possibilities.  The march of mind seemed so rapid that the most advanced thinkers of yesterday were already out of date.  ’Voltaire est bigot:  il est deiste,’ exclaimed one of the wits of Paris, and the sentiment expressed the general feeling of untrammelled mental freedom and swift progression which was seething all over the country.  It was at this moment that the production of BEAUMARCHAIS’ brilliant comedy, Le Mariage de Figaro, electrified the intellectual public of Versailles and the capital.  In that play the old regime was presented, not in the dark colours of satire, but under the sparkling light of frivolity, gaiety, and idleness—­a vision of endless intrigue and vapid love-making among the antiquated remains of feudal privileges and social caste.  In this fairyland one being alone has reality—­Figaro, the restless, fiendishly clever, nondescript valet, sprung from no one knows where, destined to no one knows what, but gradually emerging a strange and sinister profile among the laughter and the flowers.  ’What have you