the protector of all retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years’ War; and was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV.  At last he gave his consent to the destruction of the order.  The commercial bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of their fall, and nothing could save them.  “I only know one man,” said Grimm, “in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe, and this man is M. Rousseau.”  The parliaments went to work with alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no allies of the one even when destroying the other.

Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of innovating speculation with any marked nicety.  Anything with the stamp of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their number, like Voltaire or Helvetius.  The Emilius appeared in May 1762.  On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested.  For Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he courageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all his works,[89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty in identifying the author.  The grounds of the proceedings were alleged irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.[90]

The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least likely to defend Rousseau.[91] The author was charged with saying not only that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that the Christian religion does not exist—­paradox too flagrant even for the writer of the Discourse on Inequality.  No evidence was produced either that the alleged assertions were in the book, or that the name of the author was really the name on its title-page.  Rousseau fared no worse, but better, than his fellows, for there was hardly a single man of letters of that time who escaped arbitrary imprisonment.

The unfortunate author had news of the ferment which his work was creating in Paris, and received notes of warning from every hand, but he could not believe that the only man in France who believed in God was to be the victim of the defenders of Christianity.[92] On the 8th of June he spent a merry day with two friends, taking their dinner in the fields.  “Ever since my youth I had a habit of reading at night in my bed until my eyes grew heavy.  Then I put out the candle, and tried to fall asleep for a few minutes, but they seldom lasted long.  My ordinary reading at night was the Bible, and I have read it continuously through at least five or six times in this way.  That night, finding myself more wakeful than usual, I prolonged my reading, and read through the whole of the book which ends with the Levite of Ephraim, and which if I mistake not is the book of Judges.  The story affected me deeply, and I was busy over it in a kind of dream, when all at once I was roused by lights and noises."[93]