ther. Rousseau pressed my hand without addressing me a
single word. We tried to dine, to cut short all these sobs. But I could
eat nothing. M. de Francueil could not be witty that day, and
Rousseau escaped directly on leaving the table, without having said a
word,--displeased, perhaps, with having found a new contradiction to
his claim of being the most persecuted, the most hated, and the most
calumniated of men."

The simplicity of this narration justifies its quotation here, as
illustrative of the taste and manners that prevailed a hundred years
ago. The lively emotion provoked by the "Nouvelle Heloise" is scarcely
more foreign to our ideas and experience than the triangular fit of
weeping in the parlor, and the dinner, silent through excess of feeling,
that followed it.

M. Dupin de Francueil lived with great, but generous extravagance, and,
as his widow averred, "ruined himself in the most amiable manner in the
world." He died, leaving large estates in great confusion, from which
his widow and young son were compelled to "accept the poverty" of
seventy-five thousand livres of annual income,--a sum which the
Revolution, at a later day, greatly reduced. Till its outbreak, Madame
Dupin lived in peace and affluence, though not on the grand scale of
earlier days,--devoting herself chiefly to the care and education of her
son, Maurice, in which latter task she secured the services of a young
abbe, who afterwards prudently became the _Citizen_ Deschartres, and who
continued in the service of the family during the rest of a tolerably
long life. This personage plays too important a part in the memoirs to
be passed over without special notice. He continued to be the faithful
teacher and companion of Maurice, until the exigencies of military life
removed the latter from his control. He was also the man of business of
Madame Dupin, and, at a later day, the preceptor of George herself, who,
with childish petulance, bestowed on him the sobriquet of _grand homme_,
in consequence, she tells us, of his _omnicompetence_ and his air of
importance. "My grandmother," she says, "had no presentiment, that, in
confiding to him the education of her son, she was securing the tyrant,
the saviour, and the friend of her whole remaining life." We would
gladly give here in full George's portrait of her tutor; but if we
should stop to sketch all the admirable photography of this work, our
review would become a volume. We can only borrow a trait o