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“He is like an oven that is too hot,” said Voltaire; “it burns everything that is put into it.” Then when Voltaire found that Rousseau’s pamphlet was really making a splash in the sea of books, he got mad and called Rousseau a “dog of Diogenes,” “that Punchinello of letters,” the “fanfaron of ink,” and other choice epithets.

Every knock being a boost, then as now, Rousseau found himself lifted into the domain of successful authorship. His income was less than a hundred pounds a year (Voltaire’s was two or three thousand pounds). but he had all he needed, and things were coming his way.

Voltaire represented the nobility–Rousseau stood for the people. And Geneva being but a big village–twenty-four thousand inhabitants–the battle of the giants was watched by the neighbors with interest.

Rousseau was a member of the Protestant Church; Voltaire called himself a Catholic–so little do labels count.

Voltaire lived in a palace and rode in a coach with outriders; Rousseau trudged on foot alone. Solitary, he would take his piece of dry bread and grape-leaf full of cherries, and wander to the woods or on the mountain-side, stopping and sitting on a boulder to write on his ever-faithful pad when the thought came. “I have to walk ten miles to get a thousand words,” he said.

In Geneva at this time lived Diderot and D’Alembert, literary refugees, busy at that first encyclopedia. They ran a kind of literary clearing-house, and gave piecework to everybody who could write and had two ideas to jingle against each other. Both Rousseau and Voltaire, whenever they were in the mood, wrote for the encyclopedia. Finally Voltaire started a dictionary of his own.

Geneva at this time must have been a very attractive place in which to live. There were men there who wrote like geniuses and quarreled like children. Father Taylor said that if Emerson were sent to hell, he would start emigration in that direction. The refugees from France made Geneva popular, and all the bickering added spice to existence and made exile tolerable.

Rousseau persistently flocked alone and made much dole because his friends forsook him. Then when they went to see him he complained because they would not leave him alone. Diderot accused him of insincerity because he changed the name of his dog from “Duke” to “Turk,” for fear of offending Madame d’Epinay, who gave him a cottage rent-free. “He is a dwarf, mounted on stilts,” said Baron Grimm.

And all the time Jean Jacques wandered on the mountain-side, ate his brown bread and cherries, talked to himself and wrote, and got back home in the twilight to present the day’s catch of ideas to Therese and the fat mother-in-law, who at the right time always said, “This is very fine!” And Rousseau, full-jeweled, but unreliable as a horologe, loved them both, second only to his dog, Turk, who lay at his feet and occasionally pounded his tail on the floor to prove that he was still awake and that the sentiments were his, and that he agreed with the old lady–“This is very fine!” The quarrels of Jean Jacques with all three were only a quarrel with himself.

* * * * *

Having entertained Voltaire for a year, Frederick the Great shot this winged arrow, “If I had a province to punish, I would give it to a philosopher to govern.”

Rousseau is flowery and often over-sentimental. But it can be assumed that he himself always knew what he meant. Yet he has given rise to much loose thinking. His references to the “Book of Nature,” for instance, were worked overtime by zealous converts. It will be recalled how Chief Justice Marshall paralyzed a poetic attorney in mid-flight, who referred to the “Book of Nature,” by looking over his glasses and saying, “One moment, please, while I take down the page and paragraph of that passage in the volume to which counsel has just kindly referred us.”