but in advising for the best.

I did not remain long in doubt about the reception which awaited me at
Geneva, had I chosen to return to that city. My book was burned there,
and on the 18th of June, nine days after an order to arrest me had been
given at Paris, another to the same effect was determined upon by the
republic. So many incredible absurdities were stated in this second
decree, in which the ecclesiastical edict was formally violated, that I
refused to believe the first accounts I heard of it, and when these were
well confirmed, I trembled lest so manifest an infraction of every law,
beginning with that of common-sense, should create the greatest confusion
in the city. I was, however, relieved from my fears; everything remained
quiet. If there was any rumor amongst the populace, it was unfavorable
to me, and I was publicly treated by all the gossips and pedants like a
scholar threatened with a flogging for not having said his catechism.

These two decrees were the signal for the cry of malediction, raised
against me with unexampled fury in every part of Europe. All the
gazettes, journals and pamphlets, rang the alarm-bell. The French
especially, that mild, generous, and polished people, who so much pique
themselves upon their attention and proper condescension to the
unfortunate, instantly forgetting their favorite virtues, signalized
themselves by the number and violence of the outrages with which, while
each seemed to strive who should afflict me most, they overwhelmed me.
I was impious, an atheist, a madman, a wild beast, a wolf. The
continuator of the Journal of Trevoux was guilty of a piece of
extravagance in attacking my pretended Lycanthropy, which was by no means
proof of his own. A stranger would have thought an author in Paris was
afraid of incurring the animadversion of the police, by publishing a work
of any kind without cramming into it some insult to me. I sought in vain