my heart, a stopping of my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears under all the discords of a miserable life.  He made another effort to quicken the dead.  Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740—­spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old haunts.  The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end.  After a stay of a few months, his desolation again overcame him.  It was agreed that he should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]

It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him.  His plan of musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no member of whom was instructed in the musical art.  Rousseau, dumb, inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which his critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and objections which he perceived that they did not at all understand.  His experience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection, how even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any one thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without study of the special matter in question.  It astonished him that all these learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorant that a man should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft.[107]

His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind.  He had a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future.  He was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering gallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of them, declaring his passion for her.  Madame Dupin was the daughter of one, and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and the attentions of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by inviting him to dine in the servants’ hall, were not pleasing to her.[108] She forgave the impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M. Francueil, was Rousseau’s patron for some years.[109] On the whole, however, in spite of his own account of his social ineptitude, there cannot have been anything so repulsive in his manners as this account would lead us to think.  There is no grave anachronism in introducing here the impression which he made on two fine ladies not many years after this.  “He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he is without the air of politeness.  He seems to be ignorant of