A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 6Guizot, François
History
A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 6
Guizot, François
France -- History
would be too shocking. I have so often preached tolerance! It must not
be always required of others and never displayed towards them. This poor
creature believes in God, let us pass over that; he will not make a sect.
He is a bore; all arguers are. If all bores of books were to be burned,
the whole country would have to be made into one great fireplace. Come,
come, let us leave those to argue who leave us to joke; let us burn
neither people nor books and remain at peace, that is my advice. That,
in my opinion, is what might have been said, only in better style, by M.
Voltaire, and it would not have been, as it seems to me, the worst advice
he could have given.”
My lord Marshal had left Neuchatel; Rousseau no longer felt safe there;
he made up his mind to settle in the Island of St. Pierre, in the middle
of the Lake of Bienne. Before long an order from the Bernese senate
obliged, him to quit it “within four and twenty hours, and with a
prohibition against ever returning, under the heaviest penalties.”
Rousseau went through Paris and took refuge in England, whither he was
invited by the friendliness of the historian Hume. There it was that he
began writing his _Confessions_.
Already the reason of the unhappy philosopher, clouded as it had
sometimes been by the violence of his emotions, was beginning to be
shaken at the foundations; he believed himself to be the victim of an
immense conspiracy, at the head of which was his friend Hume. The latter
flew into a rage; he wrote to Baron d’Holbach: “My dear Baron, Rousseau
is a scoundrel.” Rousseau was by this time mad.
He returned to France. The Prince of Conti, faithful to his
philosophical affections, quartered him at the castle of Trye, near
Gisors. Thence he returned to Paris, still persecuted, he said, by
invisible enemies. Retiring, finally, to the pavilion of Ermenonville,
which had been offered to him by M. de Girardin, he died there at the age
of sixty-six, sinking even more beneath imaginary woes than under the
real sorrows and bitter deceptions of his life. The disproportion
between his intellect and his character, between the boundless pride and
the impassioned weakness of his spirit, had little by little estranged
his friends and worn out the admiration of his contemporaries. By his
writings Rousseau acted more powerfully upon posterity than upon his own
times: his personality had ceased to do his genius injustice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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