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 or two, and pass on to the consideration of other matters.

“He had been good-looking; but I am sure that no one, even in his best days, could have looked at him without laughing, so clearly was the word pedant written in all the lines of his face and in every movement of his person.  To be complete, he should have been ignorant, gourmand, and cowardly.  But, far from this, he was very learned, temperate, and madly courageous.  He had all the great qualities of the soul, joined to an insufferable disposition, and a self-satisfaction which amounted almost to delirium.  But what devotion, what zeal, what a tender and generous soul!”