In the ninth book of the _Confessions_, Rousseau informs us that when he reached the age of forty-five, he realised that he had really never enjoyed true love. As a result he began living in a fantastic world where his craving was satisfied. He realised his wishes in his day dreams. "The impossibility of attaining real beings," he says, "threw me into the regions of chimera, and seeing nothing in existence worthy of my delirium, I sought food for it in the ideal world, which my imagination quickly peopled with beings after my own heart." He tells us how he valued love and friendship, and that he created two female friends according to his taste, that he gave one of them a lover, who was also the platonic friend of the other lady; that in this friend and lover he drew his own portrait. He imagined that there were to be no rivalries or pain. These fictions, he continues, gained in consistence. He then had an inclination to put on paper this situation of fancy. "Recollecting everything I had felt during my youth, this, in some measure, gave me an object to that desire of loving which I had never been able to satisfy, and by which I felt myself consumed." Here we have the secret. He sought in art what he had not in reality. At first he wrote incoherent letters, just as his feelings prompted him, and he thus completed the two first parts of the novel (which is in the form of letters) without a conscious effort to make a connected work. At this time Rousseau, who was a married man, fell in love with the wife of D'Holbach, Sophia D'Houdetot. He loved her madly. He says, "It was not until after her departure that, wishing to think of Julia (his heroine), I was struck with surprise at being unable to think of anything but Madame D'Holbach." He now identified the real with the ideal; he found the woman of his dreams. But now his troubles began. Union with his beloved Countess was impossible. New emotions rose within him, as material for his novel. The work really wrote itself. He originally formed an ideal because he was not loved by any one who fulfilled that conception. When he discovered such a person and she was beyond his attainment, he imagined himself as her lover. All the misery he recorded had its counterpart in his personal experience. Without the unconscious reveries which he indulged in as a result of his needs and tribulations, the novel would not have been written. After the story was published, women worshipped the author. It was recognised that he was the hero of the book, and it was generally believed that the characters were not fictitious. The novel gives us an account of the real Rousseau at least as fully as the _Confessions_ themselves, where facts are not always truthfully reported.