From Lausanne he went to Neuchatel, where he had more success, for, teaching others, he began himself to learn.  But no success was marked enough to make him resist a vagrant chance.  One day in his rambles falling in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing Europe in search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy Sepulchre, he at once attached himself to him in the capacity of interpreter.  In this position he remained for a few weeks, until the French minister at Soleure took him away from the Greek monk, and despatched him to Paris to be the attendant of a young officer.[62] A few days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, and which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all other wonders disappointed them,[63] convinced him that here was not what he sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame de Warens and more familiar lands.

The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and which we may date in the summer of 1732,[64] was always counted by Rousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of redeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money.  He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back again to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in the stead of books.  Scarcely any great writer since the revival of letters has been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to literature for the most characteristic part of his work.  He was formed by life; not by life in the sense of contact with a great number of active and important persons, or with a great number of persons of any kind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of his own impressions.  A world composed of such people, all dispensing with the inherited portion of human experience, and living independently on their own stock, would rapidly fall backwards into dissolution.  But there is no more rash idea of the right composition of a society than one which leads us to denounce a type of character for no better reason than that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces.  There is very little danger of Rousseau’s type becoming common, unless lunar or other great physical influences arise to work a vast change in the cerebral constitution of the species.  We may safely trust the prodigious vis inertioe of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricity beyond bounds spreading too far.  At present, however, it is enough, without going into the general question, to notice the particular fact that while the other great exponents of the eighteenth century movement, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength of understanding by the study and practice of literature, Rousseau, the leader of the reaction against that movement, was wandering a beggar and an outcast, craving the rude fare of the peasant’s hut, knocking at roadside inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, or in the great desolate streets of towns.