s in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted
him, if his natural irritation had not been made intense and
irresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publication
of Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present friends. The
simplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, as
he thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they
were officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just cast
off.[15] Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons
whose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his
old literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with
him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers,
indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a
plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko.[16] That Rousseau was
thoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary
jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect
that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others of a
meanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself. The
resounding success which followed the New Heloisa and Emilius put an
end to these apprehensions. It raised him to a pedestal in popular
esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That very
success unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last
chance of ending his days in full reasonableness.

Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and
peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the
letters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west
winds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who
live with nature.[17] At the end of his garden was a summer-house, and
here even on wintry days he sat composing or copying. It was not music
only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts
of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg and
other ladies for some moderate fee.[18] Sometimes he moved from his
own lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends had
induced him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was
of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in
the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds of every kind,
with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I
composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Em