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Louise-Florence d’Épinay, a wealthy noblewoman who had rejected her husband—a philandering, dissolute tax farmer—and whose family château stood on the edge of the forest of Montmorency. In her diary she described Rousseau as seeming “ignorant of the ways of society, but it is clear enough that he is exceedingly able. His complexion is dark and his face is lit up by very burning eyes. When he talks he appears good-looking. But when one recalls his face afterwards one thinks of him as plain.” Rousseau was always lucky in his patrons: Mme d’Épinay would become, for a time, a loyal supporter.
    Rousseau, with Mlle Le Vasseur and her infirm mother, moved to the dwelling Mme d’Épinay had renovated for him, the Hermitage, a short distance from her château—though only after a sharp exchange with his hostess in which he obdurately asserted his financial self-sufficiency. In the Hermitage, he enjoyed, in Mme d’Épinay’s words, “five rooms, a kitchen, a cellar, an acre and a quarter of kitchen garden, a spring of running water, and the forest for a garden.” She had even ingeniously reconstructed the fireplaces so that one fire heated several rooms.
    By this time, the German-born Friedrich Grimm, a hard-up aristocrat who was editor of the cultural newsletter
Correspondance littéraire,
had become Mme d’Épinay’s latest
amour,
and he was a fixture at the château, as was Mme d’Épinay’s sister-in-law, Countess Sophie d’Houdetot, with whom Rousseau would fall unbearably in love.
    In Paris, Rousseau’s departure from the capital was derided and there were confident predictions of his speedy return. But for Rousseau, the adjustment from town to country signaled a self-conscious sloughing off of his Parisian skin, a bid for independence and authenticity, and a denial of the
philosophes
’ approach to life that privileged reason above feeling. He was convinced that the seething immorality of the big city had dripped poison into his spirit. Following this escape, “I recovered my own true nature.”
    His own true nature was ready to embrace Nature itself. The atmosphere in Paris had become abhorrent to him. The triumph of his opera, he mused in the
Confessions,
“sowed the seed of those secret jealousieswhich did not break out till long afterwards.” Even by 1756, he observed in literary men, including Grimm and Diderot, a distinct absence of their previous cordiality. When he was invited to the soirées given by the richest member of the
philosophe
circle, Baron Thiry d’Holbach, the other guests, regular members of the baron’s coterie, whispered in one another’s ears while Rousseau was ignored. Later, in 1757, when Diderot composed a play,
The Natural Son,
he included a line which Rousseau
knew
was aimed at him: “The good man lives in society; only a wicked man lives alone.” He was deeply hurt.
    Rousseau had entered a period of psychological transformation that he recorded in exalted terms. In the
Confessions,
he portrayed himself as having become intoxicated with virtue: an intoxication which started in his head but flowed to his heart. It “was the origin of my sudden eloquence, and of the truly celestial fire that burned in me and spread to my early books.” He also experienced a surge in confidence in his dealings with others. The effect of these changes on Rousseau can be seen in his 1758
Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater
—a clash with Jean-Baptiste Le Rond d’Alembert that involved both Diderot and Voltaire. D’Alembert, Diderot’s coeditor on the
Encyclopédie,
was a pioneering mathematician and theoretical astronomer, a sparkling conversationalist and talented mimic. He was generally held to have a lovable character, free of extreme passions—except for his invincible ambition.
    Following an excursion to Geneva, in the course of which he