The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome.  Rousseau’s eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the duty of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of the gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amusement.

    Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos
      Jacere pulvillos amant?

So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires, and their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while they were full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and there received the nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have drawn in more salutary sort from a healthy foster-mother in the country.  This, however, was only an incidental drawback to a movement which was in its main lines full of excellent significance.  The importance of giving freedom to the young limbs, of accustoming the body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surrounding youth with light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny detail such as the propriety of substituting for coral or ivory some soft substance against which the growing teeth might press a way without irritation, all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of interest that gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the poetic.  Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth like that with which the author had denounced comedy.[280] The city is held up to indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had been in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of the adult life.  Every child ought to be born and nursed in the country, and it would be all the better if it remained in the country to the last day of its existence.  You must accustom it little by little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes; also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises, beginning with snapping a cap in a pistol.  If the infant cries from pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; your caresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the child will remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its own way.  The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she is not to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations that come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and only referring to objects which may be shown to the child.  “Our unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not understand, begins earlier than we suppose.”  Let there be no haste in inducing the child to speak articulately.  The evil of precipitation in this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense, but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own, without our perceiving it.  Mistakes of this sort, committed thus early, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of the mind for the rest of the creature’s life.  Hence it is a good thing to keep a child’s vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should have more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possibly realise in thought.[281]