and had seated himself in a corner, showing no other impatience than
that about dinner, in order to get away very soon.

"Finally, my toilet finished, and my eyes still red and swollen, I go
to the parlor. I see a little man, ill-dressed and scowling, who rose
clumsily, who _chewed out_ some confused words. I look, and I guess who
it is,--I try to speak,--I burst into tears. Francueil tries to put
us in tune by a pleasantry, and bursts into tears. We could not say
anything to each other. Rousseau pressed my hand without addressing me a
single word. We tried to dine, to cut short all these sobs. But I could
eat nothing. M. de Francueil could not be witty that day, and
Rousseau escaped directly on leaving the table, without having said a
word,--displeased, perhaps, with having found a new contradiction to
his claim of being the most persecuted, the most hated, and the most
calumniated of men."

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 Héloïse" 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