the promised land. All
accumulated dissatisfactions, weariness of the world, ennui, vague
disgust, a multitude of suppressed desires gush forth, like subterranean
waters, under the sounding line that for the first time brings them to
light. Rousseau with his soundings struck deep and true through his own
trials and through genius. In a wholly artificial society where people
are drawing room puppets, and where life consists in a graceful parade
according to a recognized model, he preaches a return to nature,
independence, earnestness, passion, and effusion, a manly, active,
ardent and happy existence in the open air and in sunshine. What an
opening for restrained faculties, for the broad and luxurious fountain
ever bubbling in man's breast, and for which their nice society provides
no issue!--woman of the court is familiar with love as then practiced,
simply a preference, often only a pastime, mere gallantry of which
the exquisite polish poorly conceals the shallowness, coldness
and, occasionally, wickedness; in short, adventures, amusements and
personages as described by Crebillion jr. One evening, about to go out
to the opera ball, she finds the "Nouvelle Heloise" on her toilet-table;
it is not surprising that she keeps her horses and footmen waiting from
hour to hour, and that at four o'clock in the morning she orders the
horses to be unharnessed, and then passes the rest of the night in
reading, and that she is stifled with her tears; for the first time in
her life she finds a man that loves[4139]. In like manner if you would
comprehend the success of "Emile," call to mind the children we
have described, the embroidered, gilded, dressed-up, powdered little
gentlemen, decked with sword and sash, carrying the chapeau under the
arm, bowing, presenting the hand, rehearsing fine attitudes before a
mirror, repeating prepared compliments, pretty little puppets in which
everything is the work of the tailor, the hairdresser, the preceptor
and the dancing-master; alongside of these, little ladies of six years,
still more artificial, bound up in whalebone, harnessed in a heavy skirt
composed of hair and a girdle of iron, supporting a head-dress two feet
in height, so many veritable dolls to which rouge is applied, and with
which a mother amuses herself each morning for an hour and then consigns
them to her maids for the rest of the day[4140]. This mother reads
"Emile." It is not surprising that she immediately strips the poor
l