urn to a sort of moral
convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets,
assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the
three companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was
confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his
ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his
Musical Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer
possible. The fever of that literary composition of which he had always
such dread had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any
side but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by
his imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance
was vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts
"so as to produce a kind of romance." We have a glimpse of his mental
state in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on
anything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with
which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he
tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.[264] The distance from all
this to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not
be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other
Plutarchians. "My great embarrassment," he says honestly, "was that I
should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe
principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the
austere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting
invectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft
delights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for,
than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors
on whose books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this
inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over
it, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to
reason."[265] He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the
New Heloisa was turning his madness to the best account. That may be
true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter
to D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation a
considerable element in literature or the drama, at the very time when
he was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of his
century, a rather indecent piece of invective? We may forgive