rumours among his flock that
Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all,
that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine that
women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the
honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in very
flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness to
such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of his
neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now
and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were
believed to be devoted to search for noxious herbs, and a man who
died in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been
poisoned by him.[166] If persons went to the post-office for letters
for him, they were treated with insult.[167] At length the ferment
against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was
found placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night
an attempt was made to stone him in his house.[168] Popular hate shown
with this degree of violence was too much for his fortitude, and after
a residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he
fled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where.

In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the
lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.
Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with
something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the
sun. He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of
St. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose
government had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a
little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of
jurisdictions and proscriptive decrees.

The spot where he now found peace for a brief space usually
disappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying
himself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic
that he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees
only tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than a
high grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimic
vales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of blue
water at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, with tired
mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the sun, in a stillness
faintly br