"I, unconscious of all this, was not hastening my toilet. I was with Madame d'Esparbès de Lussan, my friend, the most amiable woman in the world, and the prettiest, _though she squinted a little, and was slightly deformed._ M. de Francueil had come several times to see if I was ready. I did not observe any marks of haste in my husband, and did not hurry myself, never suspecting that he was there, the sublime 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.