only grow
incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse
for a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being
before dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his
release from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no
longer.[34] The thought was often present to him in this form.
Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very
deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked
upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's
exception.[35] It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarations
like these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respect
to the controversy on the manner of Rousseau's death, they pronounce
him incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherished
principles as anything like self-destruction would have been.

As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and
sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of
romance shone in incongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris,
absorbed in the New Heloisa, like all the women of the time,
identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel that
none could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claiming
their identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal.
"You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you;
I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only her
cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was." The unfortunate Saint
Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in the
intervals of surgery. "You do not know that the Saint Preux to whom
you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and that
the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions
of a very different kind."[36] He figures rather uncouthly, but the
unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was.
Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of a
masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letters
were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a
reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the
neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt
of mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought,"
he said brutally.[37] The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite
obliterat