Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race.  Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in Rousseau’s books:  “I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the moment.”  He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time at great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with Hume.  There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in the midst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities.  He concludes with a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes, with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseau to take up his residence in whichever of them may please him best.[385]

Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and Mirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of the parliament of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury.  But the Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, “bore letters as a plum-tree bears plums,” and wrote to his guest with strange humoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew his Jean Jacques.  He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himself against excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to take society more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth should lead him to do.  “No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-picture, nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaseless flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own fault for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary the scene.  But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of it all."[386] Enormous manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility were not in the least degree either soothing or interesting to Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touch his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener.  Two humorists are seldom successful in amusing one another.  Besides, Mirabeau insisted that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books.  Rousseau answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it.  “I do not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always been painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other people, and at present I cannot do so at all."[387] Though they continued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four weeks at Fleury.  His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of Conti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrous fashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away at the time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refuge at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors.  Here he installed Rousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.