It was here that he received Hume's letter, agreeing to aid him in finding an asylum in England. The negotiation between them had been brought to a conclusion by Madame de Verdelin, who had spent some time with Rousseau at Motiers, and persuaded him to take advantage of the impression which the Earl Marischal and Madame de Boufflers had made in his favour.[295:2]
Hume's heart was farther softened by a letter, full of miseries, which Rousseau had written to M. Clairaut. "I must own," says Hume, "I felt on this occasion an emotion of pity, mixed with indignation, to think a man of letters of such eminent merit, should be reduced, in spite of the simplicity of his manner of living, to such extreme indigence; and that this unhappy state should be rendered more intolerable by sickness, by the approach of old age, and the implacable rage of persecution." He was inclined even to sympathize with Rousseau's petulant rejection of proferred kindness; conceiving "that a noble pride, even though carried to excess, merited some indulgence in a man of genius, who, borne up by a sense of his own superiority, and a love of independence, should have braved the storms of fortune and the insults of mankind."[296:1]
Leaving Strasburg, the wanderer proceeded to Paris, where he went about in his Armenian dress; was mobbed and stared at to his heart's content, wrote to his friends, complaining with bitter eloquence that people would allow him neither solitude nor rest, shut himself up, and went forth again to the world. Before he could have ventured to appear so publicly, in the capital where a writ had been issued for the seizure of his person, he must have received very strong assurances of protection. The arrêt of the Parliament, however, was not recalled; and his friends must have felt somewhat provoked by his pertinacious courtship of popular notice, accompanied by the pretence of a desire to avoid it, by adopting only what was simple and natural--by wearing, for instance, so simple a dress as the fur cap, caaftan, and vest of an Armenian, in the streets of Paris! Hume, who seems really to have had faith in his modesty, must still have felt it awkward that the representative of Britain should be closely allied with a person so conducting himself; and was anxious, whenever the state of public business might permit him, to see his charge safely across the Channel. It was thought, in the meantime, expedient to find for Rousseau an asylum within the privileged area of the Temple, of which his friend, the Prince of Conti, was Grand Prior. We must now allow Hume himself to describe his new companion, and their intercourse.