178 ROUSSEAU. 



with high distinction by every one, and even by the 

 authorities of the place, he still felt suspicious and un- 

 easy. In autumn, 1767, he went to Trye le Chateau, 

 a place of Prince de Conti's, where he remained a 

 year in the same irritable and suspicious state of mind. 

 It must be added to these undoubted symptoms of 

 mental disease, that, some years after, and when his 

 mind had regained composure, he really admitted his 

 having been so affected. No man confesses madness 

 in terms, even after it has ceased. We find George 

 III., in a letter to Lord Eldon, in which, after his 

 recovery (1804), he refused to have his mad doctor 

 still about him, only says, that " patients in a ' nervous 

 fever,' when well, cannot bear the presence of those who 

 had the care of them in their illness." (Twiss's Life, 

 vol. i., p. 382.) So Rousseau softened his admission, 

 when conversing with Bernardin de St. Pierre : " J'ai 

 mis trop d'humeur dans mes querelles avec M. Hume ; 

 mais le climat d' Angle terre, la situation de ma fortune, 

 et les persecutions que je venais d'essuyer, tout me je- 

 tait dans la melancolie." (L'Arcadie, Preambule.) 



When he quitted Trye, in June, 1768, he went 

 to Grenoble, and soon after to Bougoin, in the 

 Lyonnais. That vanity was at the bottom of his 

 malady, no one could doubt, even did no proof exist 

 under his hand. But he scrawled, when passing through 

 Lyons, a number of sentences on the door of his bed- 

 room, and afterwards sent a copy of them to a lady 

 there : they show that he considered the whole world 

 as occupied with him, and all but kings, bishops, and 

 the higher nobility, as his bitter enemies. (Cor., ii. 

 380.) From Bougoin he went to Monguin, a village 



