Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 49, November, 1861 | Page 3

Bear,
in my parlor. He had entered, looking partly foolish and partly cross,
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 earlier days,--devoting herself chiefly to the care and education
of her son, Maurice, in which latter task she secured the services of a

young abbé, who afterwards prudently became the Citizen Deschartres,
and who continued in the service of the family during the rest of a
tolerably long life. This personage plays too important a part in the
memoirs to be passed over without special notice. He continued to be
the faithful teacher and companion of Maurice, until the exigencies of
military life removed the latter from his control. He was also the man
of business of Madame Dupin, and, at a later day, the preceptor of
George herself, who, with childish petulance, bestowed on him the
sobriquet of _grand homme_, in consequence, she tells us, of his
_omnicompétence_ and his air of importance. "My grandmother," she
says, "had no presentiment, that, in confiding to him the education of
her son, she was securing the tyrant, the saviour, and the friend of her
whole remaining life." We would gladly give here in full George's
portrait of her tutor; but if we should stop to sketch all the admirable
photography of this work, our review would become a volume. We can
only borrow a trait or two, and pass on to the consideration of other
matters.
"He had been good-looking; but I am sure that no one, even in his best
days, could have looked at him without laughing, so clearly was the
word pedant written in all the lines of his face and in every movement
of his person. To be complete, he should have been ignorant,
_gourmand_, and cowardly. But, far from this, he was very learned,
temperate, and madly courageous. He had all the great qualities of the
soul, joined to an insufferable disposition, and a self-satisfaction which
amounted almost to delirium. But what devotion, what zeal, what a
tender and generous soul!"
In the intervals of his necessary occupations he studied medicine and
surgery, in the latter of which he attained considerable skill. In the
many subsequent years of his country life, he made these
accomplishments very useful to the village folk. No stress of weather or
unseasonableness of hours could detain him from attending the sick,
when summoned; but being obliged, as George says, to be ridiculous as
well as sublime in all things, he was wont to beat his patients when
they were bold enough to offer him money for their cure, and even
made missile weapons of the poultry and game which they brought him
in acknowledgment of his services, assailing them with blows and
harder words, till they fled, amused or angry. Maurice, his first pupil,

was a delicate and indolent child, and showed little robustness of
character till his early manhood, when the necessity of a career forced
him into the ranks of the great army.
The first threatenings of the Revolution found in Madame Dupin an
unalarmed observer. As