Voltaire had acknowledged Rousseau's gift of the second Discourse with
his usual shrewd pleasantry: "I have received your new book against the
human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in the
design of making us all stupid. One longs in reading your book to walk
on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I
feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in
search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am
condemned render a European surgeon necessary to me; because war is
going on in those regions; and because the example of our actions has
made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves. So I content myself with
being a very peaceable savage in the solitude which I have chosen near
your native place, where you ought to be too." After an extremely
inadequate discussion of one or two points in the essay,[331] he
concludes:--"I am informed that your health is bad; you ought to come to
set it up again in your native air, to enjoy freedom, to drink with me
the milk of our cows and browse our grass."[332] Rousseau replied to all
this in a friendly way, recognising Voltaire as his chief, and actually
at the very moment when he tells us that the corrupting presence of the
arrogant and seductive man at Geneva helped to make the idea of
returning to Geneva odious to him, hailing him in such terms as
these:--"Sensible of the honour you do my country, I share the gratitude
of my fellow-citizens, and hope that it will increase when they have
profited by the lessons that you of all men are able to give them.
Embellish the asylum you have chosen; enlighten a people worthy of your
instruction; and do you who know so well how to paint virtue and
freedom, teach us to cherish them in our walls."[333]

Within a year, however, the bright sky became a little clouded. In 1756
Voltaire published one of the most sincere, energetic, and passionate