to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French instead of Hebrew.  The mischief of his work lay in this, that he raised feeling, now passionate, now quietest, into the supreme place which it was to occupy alone, and not on an equal throne and in equal alliance with understanding.  Instead of supplementing reason, he placed emotion as its substitute.  And he made this evil doctrine come from the lips of a fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and fascinated imagination.  Voltaire laughed at the baisers acres of Madame de Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis of Ximenes had crushed the wretched romance.[50] But Madame de Wolmar was so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her own charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a direction that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain.

It is after the marriage of Julie to Wolmar that the action of the story takes the turn which sensible men like Voltaire found laughable.  Saint Preux is absent with Admiral Anson for some years.  On his return to Europe he is speedily invited by the sage Wolmar, who knows his past history perfectly well, to pay them a visit.  They all meet with leapings on the neck and hearty kisses, the unprejudiced Wolmar preserving an open, serene, and smiling air.  He takes his young friend to a chamber, which is to be reserved for him and for him only.  In a few days he takes an opportunity of visiting some distant property, leaving his wife and Saint Preux together, with the sublime of magnanimity.  At the same time he confides to Claire his intention of entrusting to Saint Preux the education of his children.  All goes perfectly well, and the household presents a picture of contentment, prosperity, moderation, affection, and evenly diffused happiness, which in spite of the disagreeableness of the situation is even now extremely charming.  There is only one cloud.  Julie is devoured by a source of hidden chagrin.  Her husband, “so sage, so reasonable, so far from every kind of vice, so little under the influence of human passions, is without the only belief that makes virtue precious, and in the innocence of an irreproachable life he carries at the bottom of his heart the frightful peace of the wicked."[51] He is an atheist.  Julie is now a pietest, locking herself for hours in her chambers, spending days in self-examination and prayer, constantly reading the pages of the good Fenelon.[52] “I fear,” she writes to Saint Preux, “that you do not gain all you might from religion in the conduct of your life, and that philosophic pride disdains the simplicity of the Christian.  You believe prayers to be of scanty service.  That is not, you know, the doctrine of Saint Paul, nor what our Church professes.  We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, feeble, prone to ill.  And whence should light and force come, if not from him who is their very well-spring?...  Let us be humble, to be sage; let us see our weakness, and