“I am astonished that you wonder at my love for Rousseau. I regard him as the friend of humanity, as its benefactor and mine. Who pictures virtue in a nobler and more touching manner? Who renders it more worthy of love? His works inspire a taste for truth, simplicity, wisdom. As for myself, I know well that I owe to them all that is best in me. His genius has warmed my soul, I have been inflamed, elevated, and ennobled by it. “I do not deny that there are some paradoxes in _Émile_, some proceedings that our customs make impracticable. But how many profound and wholesome opinions, how many useful precepts! how many beauties to save the faults! Moreover, I confess that observation has led me to approve things that at first I treated as foolish and chimerical. His _Héloïse_ is a masterpiece of sentiment. The woman who can read it without being better or at least without desiring to become so, has only a soul of clay, a mind of apathy. She will never rise above the common.... In all that he has done one recognizes not only a genius, but an honest man and citizen.... And a scaffold has come near being erected for this man, to whom, in another century, one will perhaps raise altars!” Manon Phlipon had found in Rousseau her guide. The feminine need of an authority was satisfied. She accepted him _en bloc_, and to defend and follow him became henceforth her concern. Manon’s first appreciation of Rousseau was, naturally enough, an attempt to play Julie to a fancied Saint-Preux. It is not to be supposed that this is the first time in her life that her attention was turned towards a lover. Ever since her piety began to cool under the combined effects of study and observation, and her natural vanity and love of attention began to assert themselves, she had thought a great deal of her future husband. In a French girl’s life a future husband is a foregone conclusion, and Manon, like all her countrywomen, had been accustomed to the presentation of this or that person whom some zealous friend thought a fitting mate for her. The procession of suitors that passes before the readers of her Memoirs is so long and so motley that one is inclined to believe that more than one is there by virtue of the heroine’s imagination. Manon Phlipon was one of those women who see in every man a possible lover.