The case is just as strong if we turn from books to manners.  Without looking beyond the circle of names that occur in Rousseau’s own history, we see how deep the depravity had become.  Madame d’Epinay’s gallant sat at table with the husband, and the husband was perfectly aware of the relations between them.  M. d’Epinay had notorious relations with two public women, and was not ashamed to refer to them in the presence of his wife, and even to seek her sympathy on an occasion when one of them was in some trouble.  Not only this, but husband and lover used to pursue their debaucheries in the town together in jovial comradeship.  An opera dancer presided at the table of a patrician abbe in his country house, and he passed weeks in her house in the town.  As for shame, says Barbier on one occasion, “’tis true the king has a mistress, but who has not?—­except the Duke of Orleans; he has withdrawn to Ste. Genevieve, and is thoroughly despised in consequence, and rightly."[43] Reeking disorder such as all this illustrates, made the passion of the two imaginary lovers of the fair lake seem like a breath from the garden of Eden.  One virtue was lost in that simple paradise, but even that loss was followed by circumstances of mental pain and far circling distress, which banished the sin into a secondary place; and what remained to strike the imagination of the time were delightful pictures of fast union between two enchanting women, of the patience and compassionateness of a grave mother, of the chivalrous warmth and helpfulness of a loyal friend.  Any one anxious to pick out sensual strokes and turns of grossness could make a small collection of such defilements from the New Heloisa without any difficulty.  They were in Rousseau’s character, and so they came out in his work.  Saint Preux afflicts us with touches of this kind, just as we are afflicted with similar touches in the Confessions.  They were not noticed at that day, when people’s ears did not affect to be any chaster than the rest of them.

A historian of opinion is concerned with the general effect that was actually produced by a remarkable book, and with the causes that produced it.  It is not his easy task to produce a demonstration that if the readers had all been as wise and as virtuous as the moralist might desire them to be, or if they had all been discriminating and scientific critics, not this, but a very different impression would have followed.  Today we may wonder at the effect of the New Heloisa.  A long story told in letters has grown to be a form incomprehensible and intolerable to us.  We find Richardson hard to be borne, and he put far greater vivacity and wider variety into his letters than Rousseau did, though he was not any less diffuse, and he abounds in repetitions as Rousseau does not.  Rousseau was absolutely without humour; that belongs to the keenly observant natures, and to those who love men in the concrete, not only humanity in the abstract.  The pleasantries of Julie’s