of her example to French life, in which this progress is reversed.  In this, as in all works of true genius, people of the most opposite ways of thinking take what is congenial to themselves,—­the ardent and passionate fling themselves on the swollen stream of Saint Preux’s stormy love, the older and colder justify Julie’s repentance, and the slow but certain rehabilitation of her character.  With all its magnificences, and even with the added zest of a forbidden book, the “Nouvelle Heloise” would be very slow reading for our youth of today.  Its perpetual balloon voyage of sentiment was suited to other times, or finds sympathy to-day with other races.  With all this, there is a great depth of truth and eloquence in its pages,—­and its moral, which at first sight would seem to be, that the blossom of vice necessarily contains the germ of virtue, proves to be this wiser one, that you can tell the tree only by its fruits, which slowly ripen with length of life.  As a novel, it is out of fashion,—­for novels have fashion; as a development of the individuality of passion, it has perhaps no equal.  Be sure that Aurore saw in it its fullest significance.  It was strange reading for the disciple of the convent, but she had laid her bold hand upon the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil.  She was not to be saved like a woman, through ignorance, but like a man, through the wisdom which has its heavenly and its earthly side.  “Emile,” the “Contrat Social,” and the rest of the series succeeded each other in her studies; but she does not speak of the “Confessions,” a book most cruel to those who love the merits of the author, and to whom the nauseating vulgarity of his personal character is a disgust scarcely to be recovered from.  Taken at his best, however, Rousseau was the Saint John of the Revolutionary Gospel, though the bloody complement of its Apocalypse was left for other hands than his to trace.  To Aurore, stumbling almost unaided through fragmentary studies of science and philosophy, his glowing, broad, synthetic statement was indeed a revelation.  It made an epoch in her life.  She compared him to Mozart.  “In politics,” she says, “I became the ardent disciple of this master, and I followed him long without restriction.  As to religion, he seemed to me the most Christian of all the writers of his time.  I pardoned his abjuration of Catholicism the more easily because its sacraments and title had been given to him in an irreligious manner, well calculated to disgust him with them.”  But with Aurore, too, the day of Catholicism was over,—­its rites were become “heavy and unhealthy” to her.  Her faith in things divine was unshaken; but the confessional was empty, the mass dull, the ceremonial ridiculous to her.  She was glad to pray alone, and in her own words.  Hers was a nature beyond forms.  By a rapid intuition, she saw and appropriated what is intrinsic in all religions,—­faith in God and love to man.  However wild and volcanic may have been her creed in other matters, she has never lost sight of these two cardinal points, which have been the consolation of her life and its redemption.  The year comprising these studies and this new freedom ended sadly with the death of her grandmother.