After the publication of this discourse Rousseau repaired to Geneva, where he was well received by his countrymen. He there abjured Catholicism and resumed the profession of the reformed religion. But he soon returned to Paris; and, at the invitation of Madame d’Epinay, in 1756, took up his residence at the house called L’Hermitage, in the valley of Montmorency, near Paris. It was in this pleasant retirement that he began his celebrated novel ‘Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloïse,’ which he finished in 1759. As a work of imagination and invention it is little worth; but as a model of impassioned eloquence, it will be admired as long as the French language shall continue to be spoken or read by men. Rousseau, while he wrote it, was himself under the influence of a passion which he had conceived for the beautiful Madame d’Houdetot, Madame d’Epinay’s sister-in-law, a love totally hopeless and ridiculous on his part, but which no doubt inspired him while engaged in the composition of this work. When it appeared, many people, especially women, thought that Julie was a real living object of his attachment, and the supposition being favourable to the popularity of the book and its author, Rousseau was not very anxious to undeceive them. He esteemed the fourth portion of the work the best. “The first two parts are but the desultory verbiage of feverish excitement, and yet I could never alter them after I had once written them. The fifth and the sixth are comparatively weak, but I let them remain out of consideration of their moral utility.... My imagination cannot embellish the objects I see; it must create its own objects. If I am to paint the spring, I must do it in winter; if to describe a landscape, I must be shut up within walls: were I confined in the Bastille, I should then write best on the charms of liberty. I never could write as a matter of business, I can only do it through impulse or passion.” (Rousseau’s ‘Notes to the Nouvelle Heloïse,’ in Mercier and Le Tourneur’s edition.) He had great difficulty in constructing his periods; he turned them and he altered them repeatedly in his head, often while in bed, before he attempted to put them on paper.