name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet
curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.

Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the
second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental
confusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the
gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume,
and that he was watched day and night with a view to his
destruction.[388] He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save
a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the
pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interest
he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense.
He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could
employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in
arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare
seed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more the
same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled from Wootton. He
meant apparently to go to Chamberi, drawn by the deep magnetic force
of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his way
thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that he
had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was
undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper
authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for
that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how
eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof
demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they
might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed
to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of
droning wretchedness.[389] Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he
spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at
Monquin on adjoining uplands.[390] The estrangement from Theresa, of
which enough has been said already,[391] was added to his other
torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done
since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the
Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us
to be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his
face eastwards, and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the
islands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely, n