The story abounds in sumptuary detail.  The table partakes of the general plenty, but this plenty is not ruinous.  The senses are gratified without daintiness.  The food is common, but excellent of its kind.  The service is simple, yet exquisite.  All that is mere show, all that depends on vulgar opinion, all fine and elaborate dishes whose value comes of their rarity, and whose names you must know before finding any goodness in them, are banished without recall.  Even in such delicacies as they permit themselves, our friends abstain every day from certain things which are reserved for feasts on special occasions, and which are thus made more delightful without being more costly.  What do you suppose these delicacies are?  Rare game, or fish from the sea, or dainties from abroad?  Better than all that; some delicious vegetable of the district, one of the savoury things that grow in our garden, some fish from the lake dressed in a peculiar way, some cheese from our mountains.  The service is modest and rustic, but clean and smiling.  Neither gold-laced liveries in sight of which you die of hunger, nor tall crystals laden with flowers for your only dessert, here take the place of honest dishes.  Here people have not the art of nourishing the stomach through the eyes, but they know how to add grace to good cheer, to eat heartily without inconvenience, to drink merrily without losing reason, to sit long at table without weariness, and always to rise from it without disgust.[63]

One singularity in this ideal household was the avoidance of those middle exchanges between production and consumption, which enrich the shopkeeper but impoverish his customers.  Not one of these exchanges is made without loss, and the multiplication of these losses would weaken even a man of fortune.  Wolmar seeks those real exchanges in which the convenience of each party to the bargain serves as profit for both.  Thus the wool is sent to the factories, from which they receive cloth in exchange; wine, oil, and bread are produced in the house; the butcher pays himself in live cattle; the grocer receives grain in return for his goods; the wages of the labourers and the house-servants are derived from the produce of the land which they render valuable.[64] It was reserved for Fourier, Cabet, and the rest, to carry to its highest point this confusion of what is so fascinating in a book with what is practicable in society.

The expatiation on the loveliness of a well-ordered interior may strike the impatient modern as somewhat long, and the movement as very slow, just as people complain of the same things in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften.  Such complaint only proves inability, which is or is not justifiable, to seize the spirit of the writer.  The expatiation was long and the movement slow, because Rousseau was full of his thoughts; they were a deep and glowing part of himself, and did not merely skim swiftly and lightly through his mind.  Anybody