Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental confusion.  Dusky phantoms walked with him once more.  He knew the gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume, and that he was watched day and night with a view to his destruction.[388] He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron.  The only interest he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense.  He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare seed which needed careful tending.  But the story had once more the same conclusion.  He fled from Trye, as he had fled from Wootton.  He meant apparently to go to Chamberi, drawn by the deep magnetic force of old memories that seemed long extinct.  But at Grenoble on his way thither he encountered a substantial grievance.  A man alleged that he had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously.  He was undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper authorities, but Rousseau’s correspondents suffered none the less for that.  We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how eagerly it colours every incident.  The mistaken claim was proof demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of droning wretchedness.[389] Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at Monquin on adjoining uplands.[390] The estrangement from Theresa, of which enough has been said already,[391] was added to his other torments.  He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us to be inexhaustible and assured.  Almost in the same page he turns his face eastwards, and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the islands of the Grecian archipelago.  Next he gravely, not only designed, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton.  All was no more than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man’s dream, the weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself to isolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully to count the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessed to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man’s mental fibres.  Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of their fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moral solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace.  Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, either finds a man mad, or leaves him so.  Not all can play the stoic who will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible for him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a condition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure itself.