It seems safe to say that no writer of the French Enlightenment, with the possible exception of Voltaire, has received so much attention as that strangely paradoxical genius Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We know he was born in Switzerland of French blood, was largely self-taught, and made his vagabond way across eighteenth-century France, leaving in his wake a considerable number of works, the best known of which were all highly incandescent: the two Discourses, Lettre sur les spectacles, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Le Contrat social, Emile, and the Confessions.