``What was your answer?'' Jean Jacques asked, striving to appear unimpressed.

``I refused,'' Duclos said. ``What else could I do? Monsieur de Cury was incensed, of course. But I said I would first have to get the author's permission. And I was certain he would refuse.''

How infuriating all this was! Why had not this success come to him before he had plunged into his Discourse, and before he had committed himself to a life of austerity and denial? Now, when everything was opening up to him -- even the court of Louis/15 15,! - he had to play a role of self-effacement.

Back and forth Duclos had to go, between M. de Cury and Jean Jacques and between the Duke d'Aumont and Jean Jacques again, as his little operetta, The Village Soothsayer, though still unperformed, took on ever more importance.

And of course the news of who the composer was did finally begin to get around among his closest friends. But they, naturally, kept his secret well, and the public at large knew only of a great excitement in musical and court circles.

How titillating it was to go among people who did not know him as the composer, but who talked in the most glowing terms of the promise of the piece after having heard the first rehearsals. The furor was such that people who could not possibly have squirmed their way into the rehearsals were pretending that they were intimate with the whole affair and that it would be sensational. And listening to such a conversation one morning while taking a cup of chocolate in a cafe, Rousseau found himself bathed in perspiration, trembling lest his authorship become known, and at the same time dreaming of the startling effect he would make if he should proclaim himself suddenly as the composer.