 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote little about taste and beauty, only diatribes about the corrupting influence of the arts in general and a few pieces about musical composition. It was Marmontel, his fellow philosophe, who attempted to create a theory of taste extrapolated from Rousseau’s philosophy. In his Essai sur le goût, which prefaces his Éléments de littérature (1787), Marmontel determines, like Batteux and many others, that good taste is based on nature. He then recounts a series of stages in which man passes from good taste to bad taste and then back to good. First there are the “savage men” who express themselves with eloquence but no “excessive hyperbole” or “superfluous epithet”. In Marmontel’s system, the second stage is that of the “uncultured” or “barbaric” man, who prefers artificial and convoluted language. Alienated from nature, he has been corrupted by luxury, vanity, and the whims of fashion. This bad taste can be compared to André’s lowest type of taste, which he calls arbitrary, because it is capricious and constantly changing. Finally, in Marmontel’s model, the “civilized man” emerges in the third stage, when he returns to nature. This trajectory is clearly based on Rousseau’s schema, as he recounts it in his political works, of the noble savage who becomes corrupted by society, and who finally, in some unspecified future, will return to the original stage. Aside from these ideas, Marmontel’s poetics were a return to a conventional system of classification of figures of style, compatible with his contemporary Dumarsais’ listing of tropes.