The abuse of intellectual work, especially dangerous in a thinker whose ideas were developed slowly and with difficulty, joined to the ever-increasing stimulus of ambition, gradually transformed the hypochondriac into a melancholiac, and finally into a maniac. “My agitations and anger,” he wrote, “affected me so much that I passed ten years in delirium, and am only calm to-day.” Calm! When disease, now become chronic, no longer permitted him to distinguish what was real, what was imaginary in his troubles. In fact, he bade farewell to the world of society, in which he had never felt at home, and retired into solitude; but even in the country, people from the town zealously pursued him, and the tumult of the world and notions of _amour-propre_ veiled the freshness of nature. It is in vain for him to hide himself in the woods, he writes in his _Rêveries_; the crowd attaches itself to him and follows him. We think once more of Tasso’s lines:-- “_e da me stesso_ _Sempre fuggendo, avrò me sempre appresso._” Rousseau doubtless alluded to these lines when he wrote to Corancez that Tasso had been his prophet. He wrote later that he believed that Prussia, England, France, the King, women, priests, men, irritated by some passages in his works, were waging a terrible war against him, with effects by which he explained the internal troubles from which he suffered. In the refinement of their cruelty, he says in the _Rêveries_, his enemies only forgot one thing--to graduate their torments, so that they could always renew them. But the chief artifice of his enemies was to torture him by overwhelming him with benefits and with praise. “They even went so far as to corrupt the greengrocers, so that they sold him better and cheaper vegetables. Without doubt his enemies thus wished to prove his baseness and their generosity.”[174] During his stay in London his melancholia was changed into a real attack of mania. He imagined that Choiseul was seeking to arrest him, abandoned his luggage and his money at his hotel, and fled to the coast, paying the innkeepers with pieces of silver spoons. He found the winds contrary, and in this saw another indication of the plot against him. In his exasperation he harangued the crowd in bad English from the top of a hill; they listened stupefied, and he believed he had affected them. But on returning to France his invisible enemies were not appeased. They spied and misinterpreted all his acts; if he read a newspaper, they said he was conspiring; if he smelled the perfume of a rose, they suspected he was concocting a poison. Everything was a crime: they stationed a picture-dealer at his door; they prevented the door from shutting; no visitor came whom they had not prejudiced against him. They corrupted his coffee-merchant, his hairdresser, his landlord; the shoeblack had no more blacking when Rousseau needed him; the boatman had no boats when this unfortunate man wished to cross the Seine.