This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral convalescence.  He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets, assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the three companions of his fancy.  When the bad weather set in, and he was confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his Musical Dictionary.  To his amazement he found that this was no longer possible.  The fever of that literary composition of which he had always such dread had strong possession of him.  He could see nothing on any side but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by his imagination.  Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance was vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts “so as to produce a kind of romance.”  We have a glimpse of his mental state in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on anything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.[264] The distance from all this to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed.  It must not be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other Plutarchians.  “My great embarrassment,” he says honestly, “was that I should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly.  After the severe principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the austere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting invectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft delights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for, than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors on whose books I had heaped this harsh censure?  I felt this inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over it, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to reason."[265] He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the New Heloisa was turning his madness to the best account.  That may be true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter to D’Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation a considerable element in literature or the drama, at the very time when he was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of his century, a rather indecent piece of invective?  We may forgive inconsistency when it is only between two of a man’s theories, or two self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the form of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.