ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned from Venice to stay again at the Hotel de Saint-Quentin near the Luxembourg. There, in the spring of 1745, he met a little laundress, twenty-three years old, whose name was Therese Levasseur. His meeting with Therese was a turning point in his life. In 1748, Therese bore a second child, and again he resorted to the same expedient “as far as the numbering, which was neglected.” A third child in 1750 went the way of the first two. Thus, beginning with the second, Jean-Jacques deliberately took no means to establish the identity of the baby by which he might some day prove his paternal claim. Jean-Jacques, who continued to see Diderot because they were collaborating on articles for the Encyclopaedia relating to music, compared his mistress to her advantage with the philosopher’s Nanette. Jean-Jacques, who supposed that Diderot had been condemned to life imprisonment, nearly went out of his mind.
