A Venetian experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which persuaded him that Italian is the language of music.

An Armenian who had never heard any music was invited to listen first of all to a French monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's.

Rousseau observed in the Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the performance of the French piece.

The first notes of the Italian were no sooner struck, than his eyes and whole expression softened; he was enchanted, surrendered his whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the music, and could never again be induced to listen to the performance of any French air.[118] More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind to political speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a book that was to be called Institutions Politiques.[119] The work, as thus designed and named, was never written, but the idea of it, after many years of meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality, and then in the Social Contract.
If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by came to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but which he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him to bear his many sore burdens.[120] He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in Paris.[121] Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who used to sit at table with her mistress and the guests of the house.

The company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abbes, and other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come neither by nature nor cultivation.