impoli par principes; je me fous de tous vous autres gens de cour; je suis un barbare.’  There is a touch of exaggeration and bravado in it all.  He was still something of the child hallooing in the dark to give himself heart.  He clutched hold of material symbols of the freedom he had won, round wig, black stockings, and a living gained by copying music at so much a line.  But he did not break with his friends; the ‘bear’ suffered himself to be made a lion.  He had still a foot in either camp, for though he had the conviction that he was right, he was still fumbling for his words.  The memoirs of Madame d’Epinay tell us how in 1754, at dinner at Mlle Quinault’s, impotent to reply to the polite atheistical persiflage of the company, he broke out:  ’Et moi, messieurs, je crois en Dieu.  Je sors si vous dites un mot de plus.’  That was not what he meant; neither was the First Discourse what he meant.  He had still to find his language, and to find his language he had to find his peace.  He was like a twig whirled about in an eddy of a stream.  Suddenly the stream bore him to Geneva, where he returned to the church which he had left at Confignon.  That, too, was not what he meant.  When he returned from Geneva, Madame d’Epinay had built him the Ermitage.

In the Reveries, which are mellow with the golden calm of his discovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he had set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitage to inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for all his opinions and his principles.  In the exquisite third Reverie two phrases occur continually.  His purpose was ’to find firm ground’—­’prendre une assiette,’—­and his means to this discovery was ‘spiritual honesty’—­’bonne foi.’  Rousseau’s deep concern was to elucidate the anatomy of his own soul, but, since he was sincere, he regarded it as a type of the soul of man.  Looking into himself, he saw that, in spite of all his follies, his weaknesses, his faintings by the way, his blasphemies against the spirit, he was good.  Therefore he declared:  Man is born good.  Looking into himself he saw that he was free to work out his own salvation, and to find that solid foundation of peace which he so fervently desired.  Therefore he declared:  Man is born free.  To the whisper of les Charmettes that there was a condition of grace had been added the sterner voice of remorse for his abandoned children, telling him that he had fallen from his high estate.

  ’J’ai fui en vain; partout j’ai retrouve la Loi. 
  Il faut ceder enfin! o porte, il faut admettre
  L’hote; coeur fremissant, il faut subir le maitre,
  Quelqu’un qui soit en moi plus moi-meme que moi.’

The noble verse of M. Claudel contains the final secret of Jean-Jacques.  He found in himself something more him than himself.  Therefore he declared:  There is a God.  But he sought to work out a logical foundation for these pinnacles of truth.  He must translate these luminous convictions of his soul into arguments and conclusions.  He could not, even to himself, admit that they were only intuitions; and in the Contrat Social he turned the reason to the service of a certainty not her own.