lectual pursuits. From her privileged position he was able to observe with fraternal pity the people whose fate he might have shared.
At the age of thirty, Rousseau left Madame de Warens' residence. He wished to be accepted in the intellectual circles of the salons, and to gain entrance to the Academie des Sciences. He succeeded at the Academie but failed to be accepted socially at the salons. One of his sponsors, P�re Castel, advised, "Since musicians and servants will not sing together with you, change your tactics, and try the women."4 He took this advice and made the acquaintance of several intelligent and influential women.
According to Claude Fervel in Jean Jacques Rousseau et les femmes, Rousseau's feelings of inferiority among these women induced his unnatural attachment to a twenty-three year old servant girl, Th�r�se Levasseur. "She is so limited," says Hume, "that she knows neither the year, the month, nor the day of the week; she is unaware of the value of money and in spite of all that, she has on Jean Jacques the empire of a nurse over her charge."5 Certainly Levasseur had some influence in Rousseau's concept of the ideal woman.
Rousseau primarily claimed that "[n]ature has created man happy and good, but society depraves him and makes him miserable."6 In the eighteenth century, morality took on a new meaning founded on the natural goodness of man. Happiness became a right supplanting the idea of duty. Sensual delights were natural and therefore rational. All of Rousseau's educational theories derive from his attempt to preserve nature's pure state. His concept of negative education allowed a child to discover for himself and to be punished by the nature he sought to defy. The tutor must not try to reason with the child or show authority. Books would not be forced on the child; at twelve Emile would hardly know what to do with a book. Positive education, or direct instruction, would only begin at approximately the age of adulthood, and then the studies would be based on the student's natural curiosi