So he fell back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he had over tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say.  The pastor, in whom irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication, but there appears to have been some indirect interference with the proceedings of the consistory by the king’s officials at Neuchatel, and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back.[165] Other weapons were not wanting.  The pastor proceeded to spread rumours among his flock that Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all, that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine that women have no souls.  The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in very flesh.  The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness to such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of his neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now and again whistled past his ear.  His botanising expeditions were believed to be devoted to search for noxious herbs, and a man who died in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been poisoned by him.[166] If persons went to the post-office for letters for him, they were treated with insult.[167] At length the ferment against him grew hot enough to be serious.  A huge block of stone was found placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night an attempt was made to stone him in his house.[168] Popular hate shown with this degree of violence was too much for his fortitude, and after a residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he fled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where.

In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.  Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the sun.  He forgot or was heedless of the circumstance that the isle of St. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose government had forbidden him their territory.  Strong craving for a little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of jurisdictions and proscriptive decrees.

The spot where he now found peace for a brief space usually disappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying himself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic that he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees only tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than a high grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimic vales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of blue water at their feet.  Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, with tired mowers sleeping on their grass heaps in the sun, in