He answered, “Yes, we have known one another some years.  We used to come here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a cutlet of an evening."[394]

Things did not continue to go thus smoothly.  One day St. Pierre went to see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomy mien.  He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book, and this drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room.  For more than two months they did not meet.  At length they had an accidental encounter at a street corner.  Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with a gradually warming sensibility proceeded thus:  “There are days when I want to be alone and crave privacy.  I come back from my solitary expeditions so calm and contented.  There I have not been wanting to anybody, nor has anybody been wanting to me,” and so on.[395] He expressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when he said that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men as from Parthian arrows.  As one said who knew from experience, the fate of his most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture.[396] Another of them declared that he knew Rousseau’s style of discarding a friend by letter so thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supply Rousseau’s place in case of illness or absence.[397] In much of this we suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified.  Sociality meant a futile display before unworthy and condescending curiosity.  “It is not I whom they care for,” he very truly said, “but public opinion and talk about me, without a thought of what real worth I may have.”  Hence his steadfast refusal to go out to dine or sup.  The mere impertinence of the desire to see him was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted with a famous actress of his acquaintance, that she should invite the strange philosopher to meet them.  She was aware that no known force would persuade Rousseau to come, so she dressed up her tailor as philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and vanish suddenly without a word of farewell.  The tailor was long philosophically silent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue, the rest of the company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed Rousseau was chattering vulgar nonsense.[398] We can believe that with admirers of this stamp Rousseau was well pleased to let tailors or others stand in his place.  There were some, however, of a different sort, who flitted across his sight and then either vanished of their own accord, or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to Gretry and Gluck.  With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting his music to French words, when he must have known that Italian was the only tongue fit for music.[399] Yet it was remarked that no one ever heard him speak ill of others.  His enemies, the figures of his delusion, were vaguely denounced in many dronings, but they remained in dark shadow and were unnamed.  When Voltaire paid his famous last visit to the capital (1778), some one thought