l fact. The manuscript
disappeared; but it was known that the characters who, in the printed
book, appear under the names of real persons, were given pseudonyms in
the original document; and many of the minor statements contradicted
known events. Had Madame d'Epinay merely intended to write a _roman a
clef_? What seemed, so far as concerned the Rousseau narrative, to put
this hypothesis out of court was the fact that the story of the quarrel
as it appears in the _Memoires_ is, in its main outlines, substantiated
both by Grimm's references to Rousseau in his _Correspondance
Litteraire_, and by a brief memorandum of Rousseau's misconduct, drawn
up by Diderot for his private use, and not published until many years
after Madame d'Epinay's death. Accordingly most writers on the subject
have taken the accuracy of the _Memoires_ for granted; Sainte-Beuve, for
instance, prefers the word of Madame d'Epinay to that of Rousseau, when
there is a direct conflict of testimony; and Lord Morley, in his
well-known biography, uses the _Memoires_ as an authority for many of
the incidents which he relates. Mrs. Macdonald's researches, however,
have put an entirely different complexion on the case. She has
discovered the manuscript from which the _Memoires_ were printed, and
she has examined the original draft of this manuscript, which had been
unearthed some years ago, but whose full import had been unaccountably
neglected by previous scholars. From these researches, two facts have
come to light. In the first place, the manuscript differs in many
respects from the printed book, and, in particular, contains a
conclusion of two hundred sheets, which has never been printed at all;
the alterations were clearly made in order to conceal the inaccuracies
of the manuscript; and the omitted conclusion is frankly and palpably a
fiction. And in the second place, the original draft of the manuscript
turns out to be the work of several hands; it contains, especially in
those portions which concern Rousseau, many erasures, corrections, and
notes, while several pages have been altogether cut out; most of the
corrections were made by Madame d'Epinay herself; but in nearly every
case these corrections carry out the instructions in the notes; and the
notes themselves are in the handwriting of Diderot and Grimm. Mrs.
Macdonald gives several facsimiles of pages in the original draft, which
amply support her description of it; but it is to be hoped that before