["I have learned to suffer, madam; this art exempts from learning to be healed, and doesn't have the inconveniences of it." Rousseau and the epistolary discourse of illness].

Throughout his voluminous correspondence, Rousseau continuously exploits his bodily ailments. Staging illness serves as a specific strategy which can be understood through the concept of desire: a desire for the other, whose absence is ostensibly inscribed in the body of the writer, but also for the discourse of correspondents from whom Rousseau constantly shies away. In his case, the epistolary discourse of illness expresses as much an experience of suffering as a way of relating to the world, as if epistolary writing was the privileged place for a discourse on the suffering body before even becoming a social practice. A few exchanges of letters are analysed, such as the letters between Rousseau and the Duke and the Duchess of Luxembourg, who "gave him back his life" in Montmorenci, and that with Madame de la Tour and Madame de Verdelin, which is particularly revealing of Rousseau's strategies for dealing with the body in health, sickness and death.