In amongst the smut, I had occasion last night to read Romain Rolland's (whom I adore)'s biographical esssay on Rousseau--and there it was: what I had somehow (I have no idea how, unless Camille Paglia suggested it to me) known: the connection between Robespierre and Rousseau, and Freud and Rousseau; even unto a certain famous speech that Robespierre made in Flore'al (May) of 1794, about which, I swear, I nothing knew. I have heard, and rather liked, both of Rousseau's little operettas, Le Devin du Village and Les Troqueurs, and you'd think that that would soften my heart towards him, realizing how much like moi, after all, was the subject of this protracted and, technically, ignorant animadversion.

But no, what it gets round to is a perception that I (and apparently no one else) have of 18th century Europe; France in especial. I understand, in a way that nobody else seems to, that the arts of music and furniture-making reached a kind of apogee in the 1780's that essentially vanished, perished in the Terror under the blade of the guillotine, along with a certain absolute moral and social equality of the sexes. With Robespierre, adieu Roentgen, Fragonard, Mozart (Boccherini and Viotti), and les Liaisons dangereuses.