His critics might have paused to consider why Jean-Jacques, certainly not niggard of self-praise in the Dialogues, should have claimed no more for himself than this.  He might have claimed, with what in their eyes at least must be good right, to have been pre-eminent in his century as a political philosopher, a novelist, and a theorist of education.  Yet to himself he is no more than ’the painter of nature and the historian of the human heart.’  Those who would make him more make him less, because they make him other than he declares himself to be.  His whole life has been an attempt to be himself and nothing else besides; and all his works have been nothing more and nothing less than his attempt to make his own nature plain to men.  Now at the end of his life he has to swallow the bitterness of failure.  He has been acclaimed the genius of his age; kings have delighted to honour him, but they have honoured another man.  They have not known the true Jean-Jacques.  They have taken his parables for literal truth, and he knows why.

’Des etres si singulierement constitues doivent necessairement s’exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires.  Il est impossible qu’avec des ames si differemment modifies ils ne portent pas dans l’expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idees l’empreinte de ces modifications.  Si cette empreinte echappe a ceux qui n’ont aucune notion de cette maniere d’etre, elle ne peut echapper a ceux qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectes eux-memes.  C’est une signe caracteristique auquel les inities se reconnoissent entre eux; et ce qui donne un grand prix a ce signe, c’est qu’il ne peut se contrefaire, que jamais il n’agit qu’au niveau de sa source, et que, quand il ne part pas du coeur de ceux qui l’imitent, il n’arrive pas non plus aux coeurs faits pour le distinguer; mais sitot qu’il y parvient, on ne sauroit s’y meprendre; il est vrai des qu’il est senti.’

At the end of his days he felt that the great labour of his life which had been to express an intuitive certainty in words which would carry intellectual conviction, had been in vain, and his last words are:  ’It is true so soon as it is felt.’

Three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his ’religious formation’ as three volumes.  At Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens, as a boy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul.  In Paris, amid the intellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the Encyclopaedists, the memory of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience.  His boyish unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticism of the great pioneers of enlightenment and progress.  Yet when all had been destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied.  Underneath his passionate admiration for Diderot smouldered a spark of resentment that he was not understood.  They had torn down the fabric of expression into which he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty