The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

Even a sudden illness, which affected my heart so that its pulse has from that time incessantly throbbed like a drum in my ears, and has made me a constant sufferer from insomnia, turned out to be a heavenly blessing. Thinking myself a dead man, I only then began to live, and applied myself very eagerly to learning. With my little mother as my teacher, I turned to the study of religion. I sought books, and philosophy, the sciences, and Latin followed in their turn. Nature, learning, leisure, and our ineffably sweet companionship--I thought, poor fool, that these joys would be with me to the end. It was otherwise decreed.

My bodily condition has become pitiable, and it was determined that I should go to Montpellier to consult a physician. I fell in, on the way thither, with the Marquis de Torignan and his party, who were travelling in the same direction. We struck up acquaintance, and I joined them, taking an assumed name, and giving myself out for an Englishman. Becoming intimate with a Madame de Larnage, who was among them, I continued to travel with her day by day, after the others had reached their destination. She was a woman of infinite charm. Mme. de Warens was forgotten utterly, and I willingly agreed to settle down in her vicinity, after fulfilling the purpose of my journey to Montpellier. However, after two pleasurable months in that city, when I found myself at the stage where the road divided--one road going to Mme. de Larnage, the other to Les Charmettes--I balanced love against pleasure, and finding an equipoise, I decided by reason.

The little mother knew by my letter at what hour I should arrive. I came to the garden; no one came out to meet me. I entered; the servants seemed surprised to see me. I ran upstairs and found her; her welcome was restrained and cold. The truth burst upon me. My place was taken!

Darkness flooded my soul, and from that moment onward my sensibilities have been but half-alive. I took a situation as tutor in a private family, but all my thoughts were of Charmettes and of our innocent life together, now gone for ever. O dreadful illusion of human destiny!

The Gathering Gloom

I take up my pen again, after an interval of two years, to add a sequel to my confessions. How different is the picture now! For thirty years fate had favoured my inclinations, but for the second thirty, which I must try to sketch, she has ground me in the mortar of the most appalling afflictions.

This second part must inevitably be inferior, in every respect, to the first. For I wrote, before, with pleasure and at ease; but now my decaying memory and enfeebled brain have made me almost incapable of work, and I have nothing to tell of but treacheries, perfidies, and torturing memories. The walls around me have ears; I am encompassed by spies and vigilant enemies. Racked with anxiety and fear, I scribble page after page without revising them. An immense conspiracy surrounds me....

[These delusions of suspicion are perhaps the most characteristic symptoms of insanity. They colour so deeply the entire texture of Rousseau's prolix second part as to make it not only unreliable, but almost unreadable. Only its human interest gives value to the first part; from the second part human interest is totally absent. The unhappy creature, besotted with intellectual pride, was already insane, inhuman; and this morbid condition had been aggravated by years of brooding rancour before he wrote this miserable indictment of men who had done their best to befriend him.--ED.]