HUME TO HEGEL 1712, the son of a watchmaker, Rousseau was brought up a Calvinist, but at the age of sixteen, a runaway apprentice, he became a Catholic in Turin This was at the instigation of the Baronne de Warens, with whom he lived on and oV between 1729 and 1740 After short spells as a singing master and a household tutor, he obtained a post as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice in 1743 Dismissed for insubordination, he went to Paris where he became close to Diderot, whom he visited regularly during his imprisonment He was also for a while on good terms with d’Alembert and Voltaire But he shocked the philosophes when in 1750 he published a prize essay which gave a negative answer to the question whether the progress of the arts and sciences had had a beneWcial eVect on morality He followed this up four years later by a Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men The theme of both works was that humanity was naturally good, and corrupted by social institutions The ideal human being was the ‘noble savage’ whose simple goodness put civilized man to shame All this was, of course, at the opposite pole from the encyclopedists’ faith in scientiWc and social progress: Voltaire called the Discourse ‘a book against the human race’ Rousseau exhibited his contempt for social convention in a practical form by a long-standing liason with a washerwoman, Therese Levasseur By her he had Wve children whom he dumped, one after the other, in a foundling hospital Having written an opera, Le Devin du village, which was performed before Louis XV at Fontainebleau, he returned to Geneva in 1754 and became a Calvinist again, in order to regain his citizenship there Voltaire had returned from Berlin and was now settled in the Geneva region, but the two philosophers were not destined to be good neighbours: their mutual distaste became public with Rousseau’s Letter on Providence, published in 1756 When, in 1757, d’Alembert published an encyclopedia article on Geneva in which he deplored the city’s refusal to allow the peformance of comedies, Rousseau published in reply a Letter to d’Alembert in which he discoursed, in the style of Plato’s Republic, on the morally corrupting inXuence of theatrical peformances Rousseau had already quarelled with Diderot for leaking an amatory conWdence, and his break with the philosophes was complete when he published his Lettres Morales of 1861 The period 1758 to 1761 was very productive for Rousseau, who spent the years in retirement in a small French country house He wrote a novel, La Nouvelle Heloăse, which was an immediate best-seller when it appeared 94