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Updated: May 26, 2025
He has, however, expressed in the "New Heloisa" quite another view, which is found in a letter from Julie to Saint-Preux, and is inserted principally, perhaps, to give the latter an opportunity to answer it. Yet Rousseau, as we have often seen, although unable to understand that any one could honestly differ from himself, was quite capable of holding conflicting opinions.
As I have said before, it was such books as this, as Crébillon's novels, as Duclos's Confessions du Comte X., and the dissoluteness of manners indicated by them, which invested Rousseau's New Heloïsa with its delightful and irresistible fascinations.
Rousseau in friendly sympathy went to see him; they embraced, and old wrongs were forgotten until new arose. There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris, in order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear Diderot's opinion of the two first parts of the New Heloïsa.
So hard it is with the human mind, constituted as it is, to march forward a space further to the light, without making some fresh swerve obliquely towards old darkness. The great effusion of natural sentiment was in the air before the New Heloïsa appeared, to condense and turn it into definite channels. But he came too soon, and, alas for us all, he died young, and he made no mark.
She is the most remarkable of all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Heloïsa inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse. She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766, when he was on his way through Paris to England.
We may remember that the author of this philippic against love was at the very moment brooding over the New Heloïsa, and was fresh from strange transports at the feet of the Julie whom we know. The Letter on the Stage was the definite mark of Rousseau's schism from the philosophic congregation. Has Jean Jacques turned a father of the church? asked Voltaire.
Nor can the mechanical movement of those better ordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart to literature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that comes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul. The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Heloïsa was completed in 1759, and published in 1761.
He was a constant guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New Heloïsa aloud to them.
This woman swore that the man was never able to consummate the act of love with her unless he had been previously flogged, an operation which it was also necessary to repeat before each successive indulgence. That this was a means employed by Abelard in his commerce with Heloisa, appears from the following passages in two of his letters to her;
Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossness could make a small collection of such defilements from the New Heloïsa without any difficulty. They were in Rousseau's character, and so they came out in his work. Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of this kind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in the Confessions.
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