Introduction

Abstract

IN November 1767 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was living in the château of Trye, west of Paris in the modern département de l’Oise. After his return from England, the château had been placed at his disposal by the Prince de Conti. It had been one of the most exhausting and terrifying years of the writer’s life, filled with demonic fantasies that had led him to abandon his English retreat without warning and to travel half the length of the country in an effort to escape invisible but omnipresent enemies. His bemused English host Richard Davenport had reported to Hume on 6 May ‘I have got a most severe fit of the Gout and have lost my Philosopher’, and twelve days later Rousseau himself sent a letter to General Conway, secretary of state in Pitt’s government, in which he declared ‘Je veux sortir, Monsieur, de l’Angleterre ou de la vie’. ¹ Later in life he appears to have acknowledged that he had temporarily lost his reason at that point.² Once out of England, perhaps even before embarking, he began to return to a calmer frame of mind, but he was never again to escape completely from the violent terrors that overwhelmed him in Staffordshire and led him to take flight from a country where he was free to one where he was still possibly in danger of arrest.