170 KOUSSEAtT. 



make him do foolish things, as if they could have 

 any conceivable interest in his degradation, or could 

 possibly drive him to do more foolish things than he 

 perpetually did of his own accord. Next to his quarrel 

 with Hume, nothing so betokened a diseased mind as 

 his suspicions of these two friends. One letter which 

 he received from Grimm he says contained an avowal 

 of hating him, or at least a throwing off of his friend- 

 ship ; but he says he never read more than the beginning 

 of it, and that he sent it back with a violent answer.* 

 But, unfortunately, Madame d'Epinay in her ' Memoirs' 

 published the letter, and it contains nothing like 

 what Rousseau complained of till the very end. 

 Nothing, therefore, can be more inconsistent than his 

 account of the whole transaction ; and indeed his 

 furious passion at other letters of the most indifferent 

 kind, which he cites in his ' Confessions,' shows suf- 

 ficiently that his mind laboured under morbid delu- 

 sions in all this epistolary intercourse* 



In his new residence he \vrote the letter to D' Alem- 

 bert on the article ' Geneve,' of the ' Encyclopedic,' 

 the subject of which is an attack upon theatrical enter- 

 tainments. He says he composed it in three weeks of 

 a severe winter, sitting in an open summer-house at 

 the end of the garden, without fire or shelter. It had 

 very great success, and it is written with much power. 

 The sale of this work, with that of the ' Nouvelle H6- 

 lo'ise,' published in 1759, gave him 3000 francs to 

 spare. The latter work had been printing in Holland 

 above tWo years, and had frequently been tead in 



* Conf., part ii. liv. 9 : CEuv., i. p. 467. 



