graciousness, though now and again he makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his independence with something too much of protestation.[11] Their relations with him are a curious sign of the interest which the members of the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing the destruction both of them and their world.  The Marechale de Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa.  The Prince of Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs at a few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him.  The Countess of Boufflers, in sending him the money, insists that he is to count her his warmest friend.[12] When his dog dies, the countess writes to sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to replace it.[13] And when persecution and trouble and infinite confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their own comfort would allow.  Do we not feel that there must have been in the unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men, and made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men and women away from him?  With Madame d’Epinay and Madame d’Houdetot, as with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted company.  But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees.  And the lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive by idle fancy.  Madame de Boufflers was one of the most distinguished spirits of her time.  Her friendship for him was such, that his sensuous vanity made Rousseau against all reason or probability confound it with a warmer form of emotion, and he plumes himself in a manner most displeasing on the victory which he won over his own feelings on the occasion.[14] As a matter of fact he had no feelings to conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him any ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he afterwards believed.

There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency, which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted him, if his natural irritation had not been made intense and irresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publication of Emilius.  He was tolerably content with his present friends.  The simplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, as he thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they were officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just cast off.[15] Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons whose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his old literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius.  Madame de Boufflers, indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a plagiarism from Southerne’s Oroonoko.[16]