Five or six hundred paces to the south of the island of St. Peter is another island, considerably less than the former, wild and uncultivated, which appears to have been detached from the greater island by storms:  its gravelly soil produces nothing but willows and persicaria, but there is in it a high hill well covered with greensward and very pleasant.  The form of the lake is an almost regular oval.  The banks, less rich than those of the lake of Geneva and Neuchatel, form a beautiful decoration, especially towards the western part, which is well peopled, and edged with vineyards at the foot, of a chain of mountains, something like those of Cote-Rotie, but which produce not such excellent wine.  The bailiwick of St. John, Neuveville, Berne, and Bienne, lie in a line from the south to the north, to the extremity of the lake, the whole interspersed with very agreeable villages.

Such was the asylum I had prepared for myself, and to which I was determined to retire alter quitting Val de Travers.

[It may perhaps be necessary to remark that I left there an enemy in M. du Teneaux, mayor of Verrieres, not much esteemed in the country, but who has a brother, said to be an honest man, in the office of M. de St. Florentin.  The mayor had been to see him sometime before my adventure.  Little remarks of this kind, though of no consequence, in themselves, may lead to the discovery of many underhand dealings.]

This choice was so agreeable to my peaceful inclinations, and my solitary and indolent disposition, that I consider it as one of the pleasing reveries of which I became the most passionately fond.  I thought I should in that island be more separated from men, more sheltered from their outrages, and sooner forgotten by mankind:  in a word, more abandoned to the delightful pleasures of the inaction of a contemplative life.  I could have wished to have been confined in it in such a manner as to have had no intercourse with mortals, and I certainly took every measure I could imagine to relieve me from the necessity of troubling my head about them.

The great question was that of subsistence, and by the dearness of provisions, and the difficulty of carriage, this is expensive in the island; the inhabitants are besides at the mercy of the receiver.  This difficulty was removed by an arrangement which Du Peyrou made with me in becoming a substitute to the company which had undertaken and abandoned my general edition.  I gave him all the materials necessary, and made the proper arrangement and distribution.  To the engagement between us I added that of giving him the memoirs of my life, and made him the general depositary of all my papers, under the express condition of making no use of them until after my death, having it at heart quietly to end my days without doing anything which should again bring me back to the recollection of the public.  The life annuity he undertook to pay me was sufficient to my subsistence.