When he came to Paris he composed his musical diversion of the Muses Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under the patronage of M. de la Popeliniere.  Rameau apostrophised the unlucky composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was the work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely ignorant of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore was Rousseau’s own, and the good was a plagiarism.[228] This repulse did not daunt the hero.  Five or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he was lying awake in bed, he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude after the manner of the Italian comic operas.  In six days the Village Soothsayer was sketched, and in three weeks virtually completed.  Duclos procured its rehearsal at the Opera, and after some debate it was performed before the court at Fontainebleau.  The Plutarchian stoic, its author, went from Paris in a court coach, but his Roman tone deserted him, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the great world, such divinity doth hedge even a Lewis XV., and even in a soul of Genevan temper.  The piece was played with great success, and the composer was informed that he would the next day have the honour of being presented to the king, who would most probably mark his favour by the bestowal of a pension.[229] Rousseau was tossed with many doubts.  He would fain have greeted the king with some word that should show sensibility to the royal graciousness, without compromising republican severity, “clothing some great and useful truth in a fine and deserved compliment.”  This moral difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable to an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king and courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death.  What would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should be driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness?  He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and patronage.  We perceive the born dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse into finer names.

When Rousseau got back to Paris he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could never have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the opinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large.  “He said that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right to be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed it to them not to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them bread....  This was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our quarrels that followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what he insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I ought not to do it."[230]