very day after I was married. I own to you that I could not get through
it."

"I am not surprised at it," answered Vincent; "but Rousseau is not the
less a genius for all that: there is no story to bear out the style, and
he himself is right when he says 'ce livre convient a tres peu de
lecteurs.' One letter would delight every one--four volumes of them are a
surfeit--it is the toujours perdrix. But the chief beauty of that
wonderful conception of an empassioned and meditative mind is to be found
in the inimitable manner in which the thoughts are embodied, and in the
tenderness, the truth, the profundity of the thoughts themselves: when
Lord Edouard says, 'c'est le chemin des passions qui m'a conduit a la
philosophie,' he inculcates, in one simple phrase, a profound and
unanswerable truth. It is in these remarks that nature is chiefly found
in the writings of Rousseau: too much engrossed in himself to be deeply
skilled in the characters of others, that very self-study had yet given
him a knowledge of the more hidden recesses of the heart. He could
perceive at once the motive and the cause of actions, but he wanted the
patience to trace the elaborate and winding progress of their effects. He
saw the passions in their home, but he could not follow them abroad. He
knew mankind in the general, but not men in the detail. Thus, when he
makes an aphorism or reflection, it comes home at once to you as true;
but when he would analyze that reflection, when he argues, reasons, and
attempts to prove, you reject him as unnatural, or you refute him as
false. It is then that he partakes of that manie commune which he imputes
to other philosophers, 'de nier ce qui est, et d'expliquer ce qui n'est
pas.'"

There was a short pause. "I think," said Madame D'Anville, "that it is in
those pensees which you admire so much in Rousseau, that our authors in