were in the book, or that the name of the
author was really the name on its title-page. Rousseau fared no worse,
but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of
letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.

The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was
creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but
he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in God
was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.[92] On the 8th
of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in
the fields. "Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night in
my bed until my eyes grew heavy. Then I put out the candle, and tried
to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long. My
ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it
continuously through at least five or six times in this way. That
night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading,
and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of
Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges. The story
affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when
all at once I was roused by lights and noises."[93]

It was two o'clock in the morning. A messenger had come in hot haste
to carry him to Madame de Luxembourg. News had reached her of the
proposed decree of the parliament. She knew Rousseau well enough to be
sure that if he were seized and examined, her own share and that of
Malesherbes in the production of the condemned book would be made
public, and their position uncomfortably compromised. It was to their
interest that he should avoid arrest by flight, and they had no
difficulty in persuading him to fall in with their plans. After a
tearful farewell with Theresa, who had hardly been out of his sight
for seventeen years, and many embraces from the greater ladies of the
castle, he was thrust into a chaise and despatched on the first stage
of eight melancholy years of wandering and despair, to be driven from
place to place, first by the fatuous tyranny of magistrates and
religious doctors, and then by the yet more cruel spectres of his own
diseased imagination, until at length his whole soul became the home
of weariness and torment.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Conf._, x. 62.

[2] _Conf._, x.

[3] _Ib._ x. 70.

[4] Louis Francois de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776), was
great-grandson of the broth