This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young, and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of nature made existence enough.  Then his supreme expansion had been attended with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in devout acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the goodness and bounty of a beneficent master.  In this later and more pitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only not a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh.  Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madame de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote.  At our present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease.  It was almost mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, but far less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject all his life long.  It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves.  “Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my imagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees, languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams.”  This interval he employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine.  The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, the transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort in the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination.  He soothed his emotions by associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever.  The egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous force.  His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the other quick, analogous in character but different, not handsome but animated by cheerfulness and feeling.  To one of these he gave a lover, to whom the other was a tender friend.  He planted them all, after much deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.