loss as myself, and sent me a small sum on account, the first claimants on which were the ship-captains. I could not bring myself to discharge the sailors without paying them; but many of these unfortunate men, dreading the contagious fever their ships had brought back with them from the West Indies, and impatient to return to their homes, went off without leave and without money. Want compelled them to stop passengers on the high roads, and six of them having been taken, and tried at Aix, were sentenced to breaking on the wheel, when their last words on the scaffold were— "If we had been paid what was owed us, we should not be here now." The deplorable fate and last words of these men,' says Malouet,' drove me to despair. I went to Marseilles, borrowed 100,000 crowns, and paid off the crews. M. de Castries, who was not less afflicted than myself at what had happened, approved my conduct, and enabled me to repay the loan I had raised.'

The feeling was excellent; but what is to be said of a Government which had money for every extravagance of the Court, and none for the public service?

The good company of the salons had objections still more sweeping to everything established. The aimables oisifs—' the hundred thousand people who had nothing to do but divert themselves' regarded the established religion as a most irksome pedagogue-always scolding, always hostile to the pleasures of the senses and the use of the reason. The established principles of sexual morality, sneered at as la morale bourgeoise, were another stumbling-block and rock of offence to the Richelieus, Lauzuns, Tillys-in short, to all that world of libertine gallantry, for whom irregularity was the sole rule of life-who were well pleased to learn from the lips of their pet philosophers that marriage was a conventional prejudice, and well prepared to applaud Saint-Lambert when, raising a glass of champagne to his lips, at a supper at Mademoiselle Quinault's, the actress (where Madame d'Epinay was one of the guests, and reports the trait), he gave as a toast, 'The return to Nature, and the manners of Otaheite!'

The long robe and even the cassock in the high places of the hierarchy were in those days under no more restraint than the laced coat. M. Taine quotes the following passage from the unpublished reminiscences of an ex-Parlementaire, whom, he says, he is not at liberty to name :- When I entered the world, in 1785, I was introduced at once to the wives and mistresses of the friends of my family, and passed my evenings alternately in the soirées of the former and those of the latter. And I was not eighteen! And I belonged to a family of hereditary rank and standing in the magistracy!' From the lives of Church digni

taries in old France, it would not be difficult to infer their principles. But in most cases, says M. Taine, we are spared the trouble of inference. M. de Brienne, Archbishop of Sens, and afterwards of Toulouse-last Minister but one, and the most feeble and fatal Minister of Louis XVI. before the meeting of the States-General; M. de Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun; the Abbé Maury, who became the most eminent champion of the Church in the Constituent Assembly, were notorious sceptics. Another (lay) sceptic, Rivarol, affirms that, on the eve of the Revolution, the clergy (the dignified clergy) equalled in enlightenment the philosophers. And the Archbishop of Narbonne, in describing the resistance of the higher clergy in 1791 to the political attacks on the Church, describes that resistance not to steadfastness in the faith, but sense of professional honour. We behaved at that epoch,' he says, 'like true gentlemen, for most of us could not be said to be actuated by principles of religion.* The chief ministers of religion having thus, as it were, tacitly acknowledged her throne vacant, we come to inquire what new spiritual powers had supplanted those still ostensibly, and still legally, dominant. In other words, what was the ruling French philosophy of the eighteenth century?

There were two philosophies which successively swayed opinion in the course of that century-the laughing, satirising, and scoffing philosophy of Voltaire, and the larmoyante, sentimental, and rhetorical philosophy of Rousseau. The former held undisputed ascendancy in the first half, the latter contested it in the second half of the century. Voltaire's light artillery of satire and criticism was long ascendant above all rivalry in the salons. Rousseau's strange combination of philanthropy and misanthropy first made a new sensation in the salons, and—what was more momentous-first stirred the passions of the people. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the character and writings of Rousseau were the most important and influential moral phenomena of the eighteenth century. They struck the key-note of Revolution; they woke the responsive vibrations of every aspiring and every revolting heart in France. Everything that was uttered, in speech or writing, on the popular side, during the brief but passionate period of revolutionary ascendancy, consisted of mere variations on the original theme of Rousseau. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ou la mort,' had summarised the whole democratic doctrine of the 'Contrat Social' before coming to form the watchword of Robespierre's Reign of Virtue and Terror.

The curious thing is that Rousseau, in enunciating that astounding dogma, distinctly guarded it, like his other moral and social paradoxes, from all supposition of applicability anywhere

but

but in small and simple communities. The Jacobins seized on the dogma, and ignored the reservations:

'I find two men,' says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, 'in the "Contrat Social," the one prudent and moderate, the other daring and despotic. Which of the two has most excited attention-which of the two has chiefly furnished contemporaries and posterity with political watchwords? One must know mankind very little to suppose that the good sense was what it listened to-that the paradox was what it cast aside and rejected. Men are caught by audacity, and only return to good sense when they are at last fatigued and disgusted with paradox.'

In all Rousseau's writings, as the same intelligent and impartial critic, the late Saint-Marc Girardin, truly says, his tactic was to begin with some startling singularity, in order to arrive in the end at some sensible and sober commonplace. In his lucid intervals he had much less of the innovator than of the reactionist against speculative innovation. Every one found this out who wrote or talked to him as if he held in earnest those of his published opinions which first attracted public attention and admiration. When George III. rallied Wilkes on his demagogue-antecedents, on some occasion of his attendance at Court as City Chamberlain, his reply was-Your Majesty, I never was a Wilkite.' Rousseau was, in effect, continually answering all who came or wrote to consult him about education, suicide, or State institutions, that he never was a Rousseauite.

The epoch at which Rousseau awoke one morning and found himself famous was that of the publication of his first paradoxical 'Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts.' Rousseau himself says that his idea of declaring war against all art and all science first flashed on him while walking to Vincennes to visit Diderot, who was imprisoned there. Instantaneously on the thought striking him, he says he threw himself on the grass in the avenue of that fortress, and lay there half-an-hour in a state of such agitation that, when he got up again, he found the front of his waistcoat all wetted with his tears, without the least consciousness of having shed them. A preternatural inundation! Laharpe tells a different story, and the truth was perhaps somewhere between the two. When Rousseau, he says, told Diderot of the question proposed for a prize by the Academy of DijonWhether the progress of the arts and sciences has contributed to corrupt or purify manners?'-Diderot asked him, 'Which side are you going to take?' 'I am going,' said Rousseau, 'to demonstrate that the progress of art and science purifies manners.' Eh! that is the pons asinorum,' rejoined Diderot.

• Take

• Take the other side-you will make a noise du diable!' Rousseau took the other side, and the prophecy of his friend was more than fulfilled. His 'Discours,' besides being couronné,' made a noise de tous les diables.

We should be unjust to Rousseau, as well as to the multitude of his sectaries, male and female, including such a respected name as Malesherbes-succeeded as they are, in these times, by admirers of his genius and writings more limited in numbers, more limited still in devotion-if we ascribed to the mere sensation excited by systematic paradox the influence of the ideas he was the first to promulgate in direct opposition to the fashionable philosophy of his time. The deeper source of Rousseau's immense influence over the mind and heart of his age was his impassioned appeal to Nature, and the Religion of Nature, against modes of thought, and still more modes of life which had become estranged from both.

Chamfort, the most petted author, and the most envenomed enemy, of the Court of Louis XVI. in its last years, describes a courtier, M. de V., as saying, 'So rare is any real sensation or sentiment, that, returning from Versailles, I stop sometimes in the streets to look at a dog gnawing a bone.' Not only the outside but the inside of every life, says M. Taine, was factitious. There was what Kant might have called a 'categorical imperative'— imposed by the fashion of an age which, in society at least, had reversed the Salic law and made Woman queen-not only on the precise correct manner of walking, sitting, saluting, picking up a glove, or presenting an object-but equally on the manner of thinking, feeling, living, and dying. This reminds us of the judgment passed on the deathbed of Talleyrand in those Parisian circles which preserved the traditions of the last century in the present: Il est mort en homme qui savait vivre.'

What could bring a little natural heat into French life in the last century? Voltaire did not feel the want of it; Diderot and Rousseau did, and each in his way, the latter with marked success, addressed themselves to supply it. But Diderot, as the Patriarch of Ferney truly said, was an overheated oven, which burned whatever it baked. Rousseau, too, brought strange fire upon French hearths and altars. Still it was an immense merit in his own day and generation to remind Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of such things as hearths and altars. Rousseau brought God and the Child into fashion-after a fashion of his own. His new accents of passion and sentiment, in an age of mere gallantry, took women by storm; nay, he even made it the fashion for women to nurse and caress their children. In a less vicious age, his Héloïse would scarcely have passed for a

paragon

paragon of feminine excellence, nor his Savoyard vicar for a perfect pattern of life and doctrine. But Rousseau's female models, whom no idealism could invest with refinement, had been Madame de Warens, and his servant-maid mistress, Thérèse. And Rousseau's Savoyard vicar was himself, with his most besetting frailties. However, all things are relative, and there was an upward look towards good morals in life-pictures, which portrayed, at least, better morals than those of Crebillon fils in fiction, or of Richelieu or Lauzun in fact:

'What to us seems gross,' says M. Saint-Marc Girardin,* in the "Nouvelle Héloïse," may be regarded as a commencement of comparative purity at the time it came out; and the loves of Julie and Saint-Preux, which we should have liked more delicate, seemed almost too delicate as compared with those depicted by Crebillon fils. All depends on what point one starts from. To any one who starts from the petites maisons of the Regency, the Charmettes might seem a Reformatory, and the groves of Clarens a sanctuary. eighteenth century, tired of the monotony of its libertine novels, felt obliged to Rousseau for setting pictures before it on which the eye might rest, without the cheek blushing. As Rousseau painted love in another manner than his precursors, he received credit for painting a higher and purer love. The amorous hero and heroine of the Héloïse passed almost for Platonic, because they were not libertine.'

The

The publication of the 'Héloïse' at once established sensibility as the universal passion-or fashion :

'Into every detail of life,' says M. Taine, sensibility drags its emphasis. One builds in his park a little temple to Friendship; another sets up in her boudoir a little altar to Beneficence; a third adopts a costume à la Jean-Jacques Rousseau, analogous to the principles of that author; others select for head-dress poufs au sentiment, where may be placed portraits of one's daughter, of one's mother, of one's canary, of one's pet dog, with hair of one's father, or one's ami de cœur for garnish. The ladies have their female friends de cœur too, for whom they feel "something so deep and so tender, as to amount really to passion," and whom they cannot live without meeting at least thrice in the day. It is the fashion especially for every woman, at the sight of M. de Voltaire, to be suddenly affected with an all-over-ishness-to throw themselves into his arms, stammer, weep, and fall into a state of emotion, exhibiting all the symptoms of the most passionate love. When an author of fashion reads a piece in a salon, it is the correct thing for ladies to explode in cries and sobs, and for at least one fainting fair to need unlacing. Madame de Genlis, who laughs at all these affectations, adds a few of her own. She would suddenly call out in the middle of a large party to the

*Saint-Marc Girardin, 'Rousseau,' vol. i. p. 198.

young