mother
As Rousseau makes clear in his Confessions, the "good mother who knows how to think" was Mme de Chenonceaux, the daughter-in-law of Mme Dupin (the wealthy salonière who had taken Rousseau under her wing when he first arrived in Paris in 1742). In his Letters Written from the Mountain (1764) Rousseau describes Mme de Chenonceaux as follows: "It is true that I undertook my book with the solicitation of a mother, but this mother, as young and lovable as she is, has a philosophic mind and knows the human heart. She is in her appearance an ornament to her sex and in her genius an exception. It is for minds of her caliber that I took up my pen" (n. 1, Oeuvres complètes, vol. iv, p. 1288).