That Rousseau was thoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect that other authors were jealous of him.  No one suspects others of a meanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself.  The resounding success which followed the New Heloisa and Emilius put an end to these apprehensions.  It raised him to a pedestal in popular esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant.  That very success unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau’s last chance of ending his days in full reasonableness.

Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and peace.  He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth.  One of the letters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west winds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who live with nature.[17] At the end of his garden was a summer-house, and here even on wintry days he sat composing or copying.  It was not music only that he copied.  He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg and other ladies for some moderate fee.[18] Sometimes he moved from his own lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends had induced him to accept.  “They were charmingly neat; the furniture was of white and blue.  It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius.  With what eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy air!  What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with my Theresa!  The cat and the dog made up the party.  That would have sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known weariness.”  And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many different circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where if fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and lasting happiness.[19]

Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as he craved for himself.  As on a more memorable occasion, there came to him a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he sent away exceeding sorrowful.  “The first lesson I should give you would be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for the contemplative life.  It is only an indolence of the soul, to be condemned at any age, but especially so at yours.  Man is not made to meditate, but to act.  Labour therefore in the condition of life in which you have been placed by your family and by providence:  that is the first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow.  If residence at Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to you irreconcilable with virtue, do better still, and return to your own