Comte Duprat

This chapter highlights Jean-Jacques Rousseau's letter to Comte Duprat on March 15, 1778. In this letter, Rousseau informs Comte Duprat that his wife's condition almost takes away the hope of completing, and the courage to attempt, the long voyage that would have to be undertaken to reach the refuge that Comte Duprat has been kindly willing to prepare for them. Rousseau's wife, cast down by her illness, remembers “the accommodations into which we have been shoved and the way we have been treated there during our other voyages when, younger and in better health, we had more courage and strength to bear the fatigue and the distress.” According to Rousseau, “she would rather die here than expose herself again to all these indignities.” He then talks about “mass and the incognito,” declaring that experience has made him learn “the uselessness and the inconveniences of those little mysteries which are only a badly played game.”