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Perhaps. But it must also be said that Voltaire and Rousseau had loathed each other; indeed, believed themselves to speak for irreconcilable philosophies. Their relationship—which was conducted wholly in letters, since they only met once—began cordially enough, as the aspiring artist-intellectual Rousseau sent flattering letters to the man already recognized as France's leading writer (though Voltaire's polemical nature had generated enough highly placed enmity to drive him from his native country and to the suburbs of Rousseau's home city, Geneva). But in 1754, when Rousseau sent a copy of his second significant work, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, to Voltaire, things began to change. This Discourse was Rousseau's first work fully to articulate a position which would later be almost identified with him: that human beings had once lived in a blissfully anarchic "state of nature," the innocence of which we have since lost through the corruptions of organized society. Nothing could be further from Voltaire's view that the disciplined practice of Reason was, or at least could be, gradually emancipating us from the chains of ancient passions and superstitions, and he replied with predictable irony: "I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race, and I thank you. No one has employed so much intelligence to turn us men into beasts. One starts wanting to walk on all fours after reading your book. However, in more than sixty years I have lost the habit."
From this point on the relationship deteriorated. Rousseau became more and more convinced that Voltaire was his greatest enemy, a consuming suspicion which boiled over in 1760 in a wrathful letter, equally paranoid and megalomaniacal, which insured that they would never be reconciled:
I do not like you, Monsieur; you have done me injuries of the most harmful kind; done them to me, your disciple and your enthusiastic admirer. You have ruined Geneva, in return for the asylum you have been given there. You have turned my fellow citizens against me as a reward for the praise which I have secured for you. It is you who have made living in my own city impossible for me; it is you who force me to perish on foreign soil, deprived of all the consolations of the dying, cast unceremoniously like a dog on the wayside, who you, alive or dead, enjoy in my homeland all the honours to which a man could aspire. I despise you.
In fact, far from being a dying, impoverished, and rejected man—and far from striving to return to Geneva—Rousseau at the time was living comfortably on the bounty of his friend and patron, the fantastically wealthy and powerful Marechale de Luxembourg.
Voltaire never responded to this letter, which perhaps only intensified Rousseau's paranoia and determination to oppose the older man in all things. If Voltaire would praise philosophy, Rousseau—who as an aspiring writer had self-consciously given up music for philosophy—would repudiate it. If Voltaire would elevate Reason, Rousseau would condemn it in favor of the more sure way of the heart: "I have abandoned reason and consulted nature," he wrote to a Genevan friend when his alienation from Voltaire, his old friend Denis Diderot, and the whole world of the philosophes had become evident to everyone involved, "that is, the inner feeling."
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