light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success
lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true
that no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the
age of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years,
however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength and
incommunicable savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better
ordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart to
literature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that
comes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.

The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Heloïsa
was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was
published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later.
Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at
peace with most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his
antipathy to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more
real and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them,
transformed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.

The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest
people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal
of France, and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was
capable of having. The Maréchale de Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one
of the most beautiful, and continued to be one of the most brilliant
leaders of the last aristocratic generation that was destined to sport
on the slopes of the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal
and homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating,
unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect
sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient
apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated