And, in the midst of all this contradiction, there exists that simple, virtuous middle class which is preparing to make the ascent which will lead it to power. One may imagine oneself in a salon of the _ancien régime_, in which wit is lord, and laughter and merriment reign. Into that salon enters abruptly a rough plebeian, with none of the fine tact of that company, yet a great, aristocratic spirit, a man who despised such a society and would make the world anew. Such is one's impression of the effect produced at the time by the appearance of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire was the first on the Continent to break through social barriers, but none the less he coined his heart for gold in society. Rousseau signifies a great advance: he gave up his place, laid aside rapier, silk stockings, and perruque, and clothed himself after the manner of a common man in order to earn his bread as a copier of music. He is, as Weigandt has called him, the first man of the _bourgeois_ century, the first pioneer of the new age. Against the traditions bequeathed by the past, which in the course of time had become over-refined and corrupt, he set up the natural conditions demanded by reason. His fight against inequalities of rank is, as it were, a foretaste of the revolution. "What hellish monsters are these prejudices. I know no dishonourable inferiority other than that of character or education. A man who is trained to an honourable mind is the equal of the world; there is no rank in which he would not be in his place. It is better to look down upon nobility than upon virtue, and the wife of a charcoal-burner is worthy of more respect than the mistress of a prince." Those were words in which the coming revolution was presaged. [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF GOYA. BY HIMSELF. _From: "Los Capriccios."_] The _Nouvelle Heloise_ appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later followed Goethe's _Werther_, that history of a young Titan whose zeal for liberty felt all the partition walls of Society to be prison walls, and who rose against everything that was ceremonial, against all the subordinations of the social hierarchy, against all trivial and rigid rules of prudent everyday life. Werther abhorred rules in every sphere. "One can say much in favour of rules, about as much as one can say in praise of _bourgeois_ society." He scoffed at the Philistines, who daily went along the same measured way. He saw in "Society," having hitherto moved in the simple world of the _bourgeois_, "the most sacred and the most pitiful emotions wholly without clothing." And this Society outraged him, and sent him with contumely from its midst. "Working folk carried him to the grave, and no minister of religion followed him."