Excerpt from The Open Court, Vol. 39: A Monthly Magazine; September, 1925 It took several years Of accumulated rancour to provoke the te action. Has he not confessed: I should like society as well as any one. If I were not sure to appear in it not merely to my disadvantage. But absolutely different from what I am? So at the beginning Rousseau made his effort to conform; he wished to get his Operas accepted and produced: he was forced to earn his living, and the living Of his newly-acquired servant-mistress Therese. But disap pointment and rebellion were everyday gaining force. Subconsciously. In Madam: Dupin's timid little secretary. Still waiting for literary recognition after eight long years in Paris. One day in 1749, hard pressed for money, he learned Of an essay contest on the moral aspects of the Renaissance. D'iderot's suggestion to defend the negative dropped into his heart like a match into a powder maga zine: he wrote his sense of personal wrongs and his imaginative sensibility gave conviction to his pen. An indictment of civiliza tion! Now at last the unsuccessful genius may give vent to his opinion of this world of urban constraint. So different from the ideal Of his vagrant adolescence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.