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All France was orthodox. The masses believed. With boundless credulity they knelt at the foot of the priest.

Yet what had the priest done for them? Had he introduced books among them? No. Liberal ideas? No. Schools? No. Information upon such matters as concerned their material welfare? No. Had the Church ever pleaded the peasant’s case at the bar of public opinion? No. Ever besought the king to lighten the weight of his heavy hand? No. Ever protested against feudal wrongs? No. Ever shown the least desire that the condition of the masses should be improved? No.

Royalist writers dwell scornfully upon the ignorance, brutality and prejudice of the lower orders in France at the time of the Revolution –let them write ever so scornfully, the lower they degrade the peasant, the higher mounts the evidence and the indignation against those who had been his keepers!

This government of France had been absolute. The State and the Church, the king and the priest, had had entire control. The people had no voice, no vote, no power. They had never been consulted. The entire responsibility had been assumed by the monarch and his privileged few –and here was the result. Theirs was the tree, theirs the fruit. “Whatsoever a man sow, that also shall he reap”; and the crimes, the ignorance, the brutality, the poverty, the misery of the masses of the French people in Seventeen Hundred Eighty-nine, stands as a permanent judgment of condemnation against the ruling classes, who were responsible for the material, mental and spiritual condition of a people who had so long been under their absolute control.

* * * * *

Rousseau, the subtly silent, the handsome, the bewitchingly melancholic, lived his subterranean life until he was forty-two. Then he was dogged out of Paris by the police, and soon after appeared in his native Geneva after an absence of twenty-five years. He was accompanied by his wife Therese, her mother, and his dog Duke.

This mating between Jean Jacques and Therese was a happy one. She could neither read nor write, nor did she care to. Yet she had an idolatrous regard for her liege, and every evening he read aloud to her and to his mother-in-law what he had written during the day. At every pause in the reading, the old lady, without understanding a word of it, would interject, “This is very fine!” And Therese would skilfully transform a yawn into a sigh of delight, roll her eyes in a transport of joy, and say nothing.

This was just what was required, and all that was required, save a chronic quarrel with influential friends, to keep Rousseau in good literary fighting form.

“A wife who is in competition with her husband, or who has just enough mind to detect his faults, is the extinguisher of genius,” said Goethe, who lived up to his blue china and referred to his wife as a convenient loaf of brown bread, which he declared was much more nourishing than cake, having tried both.

Just outside Geneva, at Les Delices, Voltaire had built his private theater, where he used to invite the favored children of Calvin to witness the drama. Voltaire being a playwright and without prejudice in the matter, had even suggested a municipal theater for Geneva. This brought forth from Jean Jacques a scorching pamphlet on the seductive deviltry of the drama, wherein it was pointed out that the downfall of every nation that had gone by the boards had begun its slide to Avernus in its love of the play. In this essay Rousseau expressed the view of orthodox Geneva, where the traditions of Calvin still survived. “The theater stands for luxury, idleness, sensuality and all that is feverish and base; private theaters are private bagnios,” wrote Rousseau. Probably Rousseau, when he began to write, did not care anything about the matter one way or the other. But Voltaire had neglected to invite him to a “first night,” and now he was getting even. As he wrote he convinced himself.