LA NOUVELLE HELOISE, la noo'vM ('The New In 'Julie> or 'The New Heloisa) (1761) Rousseau gave play to his temperament and talent. Here his genius abounded, for it was not a work based on erudition or on the bitter facts of life against which his ardent disposition so frequently re belled. It was a creation of pure fiction, of unhampered imagination, touching life only on the sides to which he was most attracted, and it left him the largest possible freedom of procedure. Writing, furthermore, in the epistol ary style so common in 18th century French and English novels, he took full advantage of the discursive manner of his time. No little of the interest of the novel, therefore, lies out side of the plot proper, in eloquent passages on the right to love, the morality of duelling and suicide, the equality of men, the advan tages of country as against city life, and above all on the beauties of lake and mountain scenery in Switzerland. Some 30 years before, Thomson had published his 'Seasons,' and more than 20 had passed since Haller had written his stilted but historically important descriptive poem Alps) Switzerland, however, had not yet become a place of pil grimage for tourists. The success of the 'New Heloisa' was to bring them to the shores of Lake Geneva in increasing numbers, and not a few came to visit the scenes described in the famous novel and to wander about in them book in hand.
It would, however, be a serious mistake to overlook the extraordinary interest which the passionate love story itself aroused in Rous seau's contemporaries. The editions could not
be printed rapidly enough, and persons of quality stood in line before circulating libraries for an opportunity to rent it at 10 sous an hour.
Rousseau's heroine was to him the model and type of the virtuous woman of sentiment. She had, to be sure, yielded to her plebeian lover and tutor, Saint Preux. Her later marriage she explains as due to motives of duty, devo tion and friendship. That after Saint Preux's long absence he should have been invited to live at the house of his former mistress and her husband, and should have accepted, may well appear to have produced an unnecessarily strained situation, fraught with dangers for the virtuous but once passionate lovers. The ten sion is therefore relieved when Julie loses her life in attempting to save her child from drowning.
To attribute the genesis of Rousseau's fa mous story to his own attachment for Mme. d'Houdetot is no longer possible; for it seems well established that the novel had been planned before that episode. That he was indebted to Richardson and England is beyond question. For all this, however, most of his novel re ceived its character and quality from the fact that it was prompted and colored by his own eager and vivid hopes, desires and aspirations. It is the expression of Rousseau's ideal of social and domestic life.