M.de Malesherbes, who discovered the agitation of my mind, and to whom I acknowledged it, used such endeavors to restore me to tranquillity as proved his excessive goodness of heart.Madam de Luxembourg aided him in this good work, and several times went to Duchesne to know in what state the edition was.At length the impression was again begun, and the progress of it became more rapid than ever, without my knowing for what reason it had been suspended.
M.de Malesherbes took the trouble to come to Montmorency to calm my mind; in this he succeeded, and the full confidence I had in his uprightness having overcome the derangement of my poor head, gave efficacy to the endeavors he made to restore it.After what he had seen of my anguish and delirium, it was natural he should think Iwas to be pitied; and he really commiserated my situation.The expressions, incessantly repeated, of the philosophical cabal by which he was surrounded, occurred to his memory.When I went to live at the Hermitage, they, as I have already remarked, said I should not remain there long.When they saw I persevered, they charged me with obstinacy and pride, proceeding from a want of courage to retract, and insisted that my life was there a burden to me; in short, that I was very wretched.M.de Malesherbes believed this really to be the case, and wrote to me upon the subject.This error in a man for whom Ihad so much esteem gave me some pain, and I wrote to him four letters successively, in which I stated the real motives of my conduct, and made him fully acquainted with my taste, inclination and character, and with the most interior sentiments of my heart.
These letters, written hastily, almost without taking pen from paper, and which I neither copied, corrected, nor even read, are perhaps, the only things I ever wrote with facility, which, in the midst of my sufferings, was, I think, astonishing.I sighed, as I felt myself declining, at the thought of leaving in the midst of honest men an opinion of me so far from truth; and by the sketch hastily given in my four letters, I endeavored, in some measure, to substitute them to the memoirs I had proposed to write.They are expressive of my grief to M.de Malesherbes, who showed them in Paris, and are, besides, a kind of summary of what I here give in detail, and, on this account, merit preservation.The copy I begged of them some years afterwards will be found amongst my papers.
The only thing which continued to give me pain, in the idea of my approaching dissolution, was my not having a man of letters for a friend, to whom I could confide my papers, that after my death he might take a proper choice of such as were worthy of publication.
After my journey to Geneva, I conceived a friendship for Moultou;this young man pleased me, and I could have wished him to receive my last breath.I expressed to him this desire, and am of opinion he would readily have complied with it, had not his affairs prevented him from so doing.Deprived of this consolation I still wished to give him a mark of my confidence by sending him the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar before it was published.He was pleased with the work, but did not in his answer seem so fully to expect from it the effect of which I had but little doubt.He wished to receive from me some fragment which I had not given to anybody else.I sent him the funeral oration of the late Duke of Orleans; this I had written for the Abbe Darty, who had not pronounced it, because, contrary to his expectation, another person was appointed to perform that ceremony.
The printing of Emile, after having been again taken in hand, was continued and completed without much difficulty; and I remarked this singularity, that after the curtailings so much insisted upon in the first two volumes, the last two were passed over without an objection, and their contents did not delay the publication for a moment.Ihad, however, some uneasiness which I must not pass over in silence.
After having been afraid of the Jesuits, I began to fear the Jansenists and philosophers.An enemy to party, faction and cabal, Inever heard the least good of persons concerned in them.The gossips had quitted their old abode, and taken up their residence by the side of me, so that in their chamber, everything said in mine, and upon the terrace, was distinctly heard; and from their garden it would have been easy to scald the low wall by which it was separated from my alcove.This was become my study; my table was covered with proof-sheets of Emile and the Contrat Social, and stitching these sheets as they were sent to me, I had all my volumes a long time before they were published.My negligence and the confidence I had in M.Mathas, in whose garden I was shut up, frequently made me forget to lock the door at night, and in the morning I several times found it wide open: this, however, would not have given me the least inquietude had I not thought my papers seemed to have been deranged.After having several times made the same remark, I became more careful, and locked the door.The lock was a bad one, and the key turned in it no more than half round.As I became more attentive, I found my papers in a much greater confusion than they were when I left everything open.
At length I missed one of my volumes without knowing what was become of it until the morning of the third day, when I again found it upon the table.I never suspected either M.Mathas or his nephew M.du Moulin, knowing myself to be beloved by both, and my confidence in them was unbounded.That I had in the gossips began to diminish.
Although they were Jansenists, I knew them to have some connection with D'Alembert, and moreover they all three lodged in the same house.