always disturbs me, it is utterly antipathetic to my character, which is open even to the pitch of imprudence.  The aspect of the most hideous monster would alarm me little, I verily believe; but if I discern at night a figure in a white sheet, I am sure to be terrified out of my life."[85] So he at once fancied that by some means the Jesuits had got possession of his book, and knowing him to be at death’s door, designed to keep the Emilius back until he was actually dead, when they would publish a truncated version of it to suit their own purposes.[86] He wrote letter upon letter to the printer, to Malesherbes, to Madame de Luxembourg, and if answers did not come, or did not come exactly when 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,