Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made him rich.  Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult as the application of the same principle to trifles.  Besides this greater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men value the money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary reform in truly Genevese spirit.  His sword was laid aside; for flowing peruke was substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and white stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular thought that he would never again need to know the time.  One sacrifice remained to be made.  Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had been a large stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular affection, for both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal cleanliness, as he had for corporeal wholesomeness.  He was seasonably delivered from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without.  One Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerable quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be the brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the treasure, leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of coarser stuffs.[209]

We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary power which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him.  “It takes,” wrote Diderot, “right above the clouds; never was such a success."[210] We can hardly have a surer sign of a man’s fundamental sincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him of his power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed independence.  Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world was worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satirist does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, but from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity of life, and of the limits of the world’s power to satisfy us.  “When my destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society,” he wrote in his last meditation on the course of his own life, “I found nothing there to give a moment’s solace to my heart.  Regret for my sweet leisure followed me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might have been within my reach, leading to fortune and honours.  Uncertain in the disquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt even amid gleams of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed myself to be seeking, I should still not have found the happiness for which my heart was greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing its object.  Thus everything served to detach my affections from society, even before the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to it.  I reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune, between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil tendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without despising them, but often without much clear knowledge what they were."[211]