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 ostentation, 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.