A brooding nature gives to character a connectedness and unity that is in strong contrast with the dispersion and multiformity of the active type.  The attractions of fame never cheated Rousseau into forgetfulness of the commanding principle that a man’s life ought to be steadily composed to oneness with itself in all its parts, as by mastery of an art of moral counterpoint, and not crowded with a wild mixture of aim and emotion like distracted masks in high carnival.  He complains of the philosophers with whom he came into contact, that their philosophy was something foreign to them and outside of their own lives.  They studied human nature for the sake of talking learnedly about it, not for the sake of self-knowledge; they laboured to instruct others, not to enlighten themselves within.  When they published a book, its contents only interested them to the extent of making the world accept it, without seriously troubling themselves whether it were true or false, provided only that it was not refuted.  “For my own part, when I desired to learn, it was to know things myself, and not at all to teach others.  I always believed that before instructing others it was proper to begin by knowing enough for one’s self; and of all the studies that I have tried to follow in my life in the midst of men, there is hardly one that I should not have followed equally if I had been alone, and shut up in a desert island for the rest of my days."[212]

When we think of Turgot, whom Rousseau occasionally met among the society which he denounces, such a denunciation sounds a little outrageous.  But then Turgot was perhaps the one sane Frenchman of the first eminence in the eighteenth century.  Voltaire chose to be an exile from the society of Paris and Versailles as pertinaciously as Rousseau did, and he spoke more bitterly of it in verse than Rousseau ever spoke bitterly of it in prose.[213] It was, as has been so often said, a society dominated by women, from the king’s mistress who helped to ruin France, down to the financier’s wife who gave suppers to flashy men of letters.  The eighteenth century salon has been described as having three stages; the salon of 1730, still retaining some of the stately domesticity, elegance, dignity of the age of Lewis XIV.; that of 1780, grave, cold, dry, given to dissertation; and between the two, the salon of 1750, full of intellectual stir, brilliance, frivolous originality, glittering wastefulness.[214] Though this division of time must not be pressed too closely, it is certain that the era of Rousseau’s advent in literature with his Discourses fell in with the climax of social unreality in the surface intercourse of France, and that the same date marks the highest point of feminine activity and power.