had ever a fifth act so squalid.  Theresa’s character seems to have developed into something truly bestial.  Rousseau’s terrors of the designs of his enemies returned with great violence.  He thought he was imprisoned, and he knew that he had no means of escape.  One day (July 2, 1778), suddenly and without a single warning symptom, all drew to an end; the sensations which had been the ruling part of his life were affected by pleasure and pain no more, the dusky phantoms all vanished into space.  The surgeons reported that the cause of his death was apoplexy, but a suspicion has haunted the world ever since, that he destroyed himself by a pistol-shot.  We cannot tell.  There is no inherent improbability in the fact of his having committed suicide.  In the New Heloisa he had thrown the conditions which justified self-destruction into a distinct formula.  Fifteen years before, he declared that his own case fell within the conditions which he had prescribed, and that he was meditating action.[406] Only seven years before, he had implied that a man had the right to deliver himself of the burden of his own life, if its miseries were intolerable and irremediable.[407] This, however, counts for nothing in the absence of some kind of positive evidence, and of that there is just enough to leave the manner of his end a little doubtful.[408] Once more, we cannot tell.

By the serene moonrise of a summer night, his body was put under the ground on an island in the midst of a small lake, where poplars throw shadows over the still water, silently figuring the destiny of mortals.  Here it remained for sixteen years.  Then amid the roar of cannon, the crash of trumpet and drum, and the wild acclamations of a populace gone mad in exultation, terror, fury, it was ordered that the poor dust should be transported to the national temple of great men.

FOOTNOTES: 

[385] Streckeisen, ii. 315-328.

[386] Streckeisen, ii. 337.

[387] June 19, 1767. Corr., v. 172.

[388] Corr., v. 267, 375.

[389] Corr., v. 330-381, 408, etc.

[390] Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769.  Monquin, to July 1770.

[391] See above, vol. i. chap. iv.

[392] The life of Bernardin de St. Pierre (1737-1814) was nearly as irregular as that of his friend and master.  But his character was essentially crafty and selfish, like that of many other sentimentalists of the first order.

[393] Oeuv., xii. 69, 73.

[394] Oeuv., xii. 104, etc.; and also the Preambule de l’Arcadie, Oeuv., vii. 64, 65.

[395] St. Pierre, xii. 81-83.

[396] Dusaulx, p. 81.  For his quarrel with Rousseau, see pp. 130, etc.

[397] Rulhieres in Dusaulx, p. 179.  For a strange interview between Rulhieres and Rousseau, see pp. 185-186.

[398] Musset-Pathay, i. 181.