Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand.  Voltaire had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of Geneva against its too famous citizen,[124] though for a man of less energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now in the thick of, might have sufficed.  Voltaire’s letters at this time show how hard he found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the unfortunate.  He could not forget that the man who was now tasting persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.[125] On the whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word, though not very categorically given,[126] that he had nothing to do with the action taken against Rousseau.  That action is quite adequately explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva, which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,[127] and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their town a man whose democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so justly dreaded.[128] Moultou, a Genevese minister, in the full tide of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of Emilius, met Voltaire at the house of a lady in Geneva.  All will turn out well, cried the patriarch; “the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you have done ill to write what you have written; promise for the future to respect the religion of your country.  Jean Jacques will promise, and perhaps he will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or two to his book.”  “Never,” cried the ardent Moultou; “Jean Jacques never puts his name to works to disown them after."[129] Voltaire disowned his own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge to Moultou for his vehemence.  He sent for him shortly afterwards, professed an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would talk of nothing else.  “I swear to you,” wrote Moultou, “that I could not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; I could have sworn that he loved you."[130] And there really was no acting in it.  The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealing with “one all fire and fickleness, a child.”

Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of professed unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy.  The doctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of course.  In the same spirit of generous emulation, Christopher de Beaumont, “by the divine compassion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost,” had issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful documents in which bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last century and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead and decomposing