he expected them, he grew delirious with anxiety. If he dropped his
conviction that the Jesuits were plotting the ruin of his book and the
defilement of his reputation, he lost no time in fastening a similar
design upon the Jansenists, and when the Jansenists were acquitted,
then the turn of the philosophers came. We have constantly to remember
that all this time the unfortunate man was suffering incessant pain,
and passing his nights in sleeplessness and fever. He sometimes threw
off the black dreams of unfathomable suspicion, and dreamed in their
stead of some sunny spot in pleasant Touraine, where under a mild
climate and among a gentle people he should peacefully end his
days.[87] At other times he was fond of supposing M. de Luxembourg
not a duke, nor a marshal of France, but a good country squire living
in some old mansion, and himself not an author, not a maker of books,
but with moderate intelligence and slight attainment, finding with the
squire and his dame the happiness of his life, and contributing to the
happiness of theirs.[88] Alas, in spite of all his precautions, he had
unwittingly drifted into the stream of great affairs. He and his book
were sacrificed to the exigencies of faction; and a persecution set
in, which destroyed his last chance of a composed life, by giving his
reason, already disturbed, a final blow from which it never recovered.
Emilius appeared in the crisis of the movement against the Jesuits.
That formidable order had offended Madame de Pompadour by a refusal to
recognise her power and position,--a manly policy, as creditable to
their moral vigour as it was contrary to the maxims which had made
them powerful. They had also offended Choiseul by the part they had
taken in certain hostile intrigues at Versailles. The parliaments had
always been their enemies. This was due first to the jealousy with
which corporations of lawyers always regard corporations of
ecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which
had been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion
of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of the
parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which the
system of confessional tickets was at this time being carried out.
Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of all
retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; and
was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At last
he gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercial
bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of
their fall, and nothing could save them. "I only know one man," said
Grimm, "in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in
fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe,
and this man is M. Rousseau." The parliaments went to work with
alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they
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