His taste for Voltaire inspired him with the desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating "the fine and enchanting colour of Voltaire's style"[92]--an object in which he cannot be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb style of his own.

On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he had lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading.

Saint Evremond, Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room, and he turned over their pages.

The Spectator, he says, pleased him greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de Warens was what he calls protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever persuade Rousseau to think.

Two or three years later than this he began to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and a body of doctrine.
His way of answering it did not promise the best results.