Madame Roland’s return to Rousseau was not confined to his system of education. She went back to him at this time for inspiration. In going to Le Clos she had an ideal,—Julie at Clarens. Probably she found that in practice there was much more hard work and patient endurance in her Clarens than there were pastorals and sweet emotions. Much as she approved these stern virtues, considered abstractly, they aroused less enthusiasm when applied, and she sought her prophet; not without reward, for again and again she wrote Roland of her delight: “I have been devouring _Julie_ as if it were not for the fourth or fifth time. My friend, I shall always love that book, and if I ever become _dévote_, it is the only one I shall desire. It seems to me that we could have lived well with all those people and that they would have found us as much to their taste as we them to ours.” And again after an evening in the chimney corner with Rousseau: “I shall read him all my life, and if ever we should be in that condition of which we no longer think, when you, old and blind, make shoe-laces while I do needle-work, all the books I shall want will be those of Jean Jacques. He would make us shed delicious tears and would arouse sentiments which would make us forget our lot.” “Delicious tears” are as always her gauge of happiness. She never learned that the amount of living one is doing, cannot always be measured by the emotion one experiences. In the days at Villefranche and Le Clos, Roland was as dear to her as ever. She served him with touching devotion, finding her greatest delight in being useful to him. The long and tiresome extracts on wool and hides, bleaching and tanning, were never too long and tiresome for her to copy, in her vigorous, beautiful hand; the numerous academic papers and public pamphlets never too numerous for her to apply all her literary skill and her enthusiasm to polishing and brightening. She arranged everything to make his life easy and to advance his work, and her affection was poured out as freely as in the days before their marriage. He is the “friend _par excellence_.” “I love you madly and I am disposed to snap my fingers at the rest,” she told him. Her letter-writing, in his absence, she calls “the dearest of her occupations,” and it must have been, to judge from the following letter written seven years after her marriage: