Now let us turn to the _Devin du Village_, of which both words and music are generally attributed to Jean Jacques Rousseau; that Rousseau who, in the _Confessions_, reproaches himself so bitterly with having stolen a ribbon (it is true he had accused an innocent young girl of the theft, and, by implication, of something more), who passes complacently over a hundred mean and disgusting acts which he acknowledges to have committed, and who ends by declaring that any one who may come to the conclusion that he, Rousseau, is, "_un malhonnête homme_," is himself "a man to be smothered," (_un homme à étouffer_). _Le Devin du Village_ is undoubtedly the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau, as far as the libretto is concerned; but M. Castil Blaze has shown, on what appears to me very good evidence,[50] that the music was the production of Granet, a composer residing at Lyons. One day in the year 1751, Pierre Rousseau, called Rousseau of Toulouse, to distinguish him from the numerous other Rousseaus living in Paris, and known as the director of the _Journal Encyclopédique_, received a parcel containing a quantity of manuscript music, which, on examination, turned out to be the score of an opera. It was accompanied by a letter addressed, like the parcel itself, to "M. Rousseau, _homme de lettres_, demeurant à Paris," in which a person signing himself Granet, and writing from Lyons, expressed a hope that his music would be found worthy of the illustrious author's words; that he had given appropriate expression to the tender sentiments of Colette and Colin, &c. Pierre Rousseau, though a journalist, understood music. He knew that Granet's letter was intended for Jean Jacques, and that he ought to return it, with the music, to the post-office, but the score of the _Devin du Village_, from the little he had seen of it, interested him, and he not only kept it until he had made himself familiar with it from beginning to end, but even showed it to a friend, M. de Belissent, one of the conservators of the Royal Library, and a man of great musical acquirements. As soon as Pierre Rousseau and De Belissent had quite finished with the _Devin du Village_, they sent it back to the post-office, whence it was forwarded to its true destination. [Sidenote: LE DEVIN DU VILLAGE.]