This man actually did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow, and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned around him."[67] It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company, that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a deadly affair of ball and shell.

The man who had been a servant, who had wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many, whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime elements of the human lot.
III.
It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived at Chamberi, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house.

She had procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the government of Charles Emmanuel III.

was then executing.

It was only temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk, who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations.