At length, on the 31st of April, 1767, Rousseau and Mademoiselle Le Vasseur suddenly disappeared from Wooton together. Hume thus describes the incident in a letter to Blair:-- "You may, perhaps, have heard that Rousseau has eloped from Mr. Davenport, without giving any warning; leaving all his baggage, except Mademoiselle, about thirty pounds in Davenport's hands, and a letter on the table, abusing him in the most violent terms, insinuating that he was in a conspiracy with me to ruin him.[366:1] He took the road to London, but was missing for about a fortnight. At last he emerges at Spalding in Lincolnshire, whence he writes a letter to the Chancellor, informing him that the bad usage he had met with in England, made it absolutely necessary for him to evacuate the kingdom, and desiring his lordship to send him a guard to escort him to Dover--this being the last act of hospitality he will desire of the nation. He is plainly mad, though I believe not more than he has been all his life. The pamphlet you mention was wrote by one as mad as himself, and it was believed at first to be by Tristram Shandy, but proves to be [by] one Fuseli an engraver. He is a fanatical admirer of Rousseau, but owns he was in the wrong to me. The pamphlet I sent to you was wrote by an English clergyman, whom I never saw; a man of character, and rising in the church,[366:2] for which reason it is more prudent in me to conceal his name. When would _you_ have done so much for me."[367:1] As Rousseau did not favour the world in his "Confessions," with the adventures he encountered during this flight, it is of some interest, in the absence of a personal narrative, to mark the impression produced by the incident on an onlooker, whom it seems to have filled with mingled feelings of compassion and astonishment. The following are some extracts from Mr. Davenport's letters to Hume:-- MR. DAVENPORT _to_ HUME. _Davenport, 13th May, 1767._