uld assuredly have been famous and extolled beyond all her
sex. But she found her happiness in her own family, and the sweetest
simplicity crowned her mental powers and lofty virtues. She was ignorant
of her worth, as I myself was at that time, when, brutelike, I saw only
with the eyes of the body, and believed I loved her only because she was
beautiful. It should be said, too, that her _fiance_, M. de la Marche,
understood her but little better. He had developed the weakly mind with
which he was endowed in the frigid school of Voltaire and Helvetius.
Edmee had fired her vast intellect with the burning declamations of Jean
Jacques. A day came when I could understand her--the day when M. de la
Marche could have understood her would never have come.

Edmee, deprived of her mother from the very cradle, and left to her
young devices by a father full of confidence and careless good nature,
had shaped her character almost alone. The Abbe Aubert, who had
confirmed her, had by no means forbidden her to read the philosophers by
whom he himself had been lured from the paths of orthodoxy. Finding no
one to oppose her ideas or even to discuss them--for her father, who
idolized her, allowed himself to be led wherever she wished--Edmee
had drawn support from two sources apparently very antagonistic:
the philosophy which was preparing the downfall of Christianity, and
Christianity which was proscribing the spirit of inquiry. To account
for this contradiction, you must recall what I told you about the
effect produced on the Abbe Aubert by the _Profession de Foi du Vicaire
Savoyard_. Moreover, you must be aware that, in poetic souls, mysticism
and doubt often reign side by side. Jean Jacques himself furnishes a
striking example of this, and you know what sympathies he stirred among
priests and nobles, even when he was chastising them so unmercifully.
What miracles may not conviction work when helped by sublime eloquence!
Edmee had drunk of this living fount with all the eagerness of an ardent
soul. In her rare visits to Paris she had sought for spirits in sympathy
with her own. There, however, she had found so many shades of opinion,
so little harmony, and--despite the prevailing fashion--so many
ineradicable prejudices, that she had returned with a yet deeper love to
her solitude and her poetic reveries under the old oaks in the park. She
would even then speak of her illusions, and--with a good sense beyond
her years, perhaps, too, beyo