I had seen M. de Saint-Lambert[470] and Madame de Houdetot[471] at the Marais. Both represented the opinions and the freedom of days gone by, carefully packed up and preserved: it was the eighteenth century dying and married after its own fashion. One need but hold on to life for unlawfulness to become lawful. Men feel an infinite esteem for immorality because it has not ceased to exist and because time has adorned it with wrinkles. In truth, a virtuous husband and wife, who are not husband and wife, but who remain together out of consideration for their fellow-creatures, suffer a little from their venerable condition; they bore and detest each other cordially with all the ill-humour of old age; that is God's justice: Malheur à qui le ciel accorde de longs jours[472]! [Sidenote: Madame de Houdetot.] It became difficult to understand certain pages of the _Confessions_ when one had seen the object of Rousseau's transports. Had Madame de Houdetot kept the letters which Jean Jacques wrote to her, and which he says were more brilliant than those in the _Nouvelle Héloïse?_ It is believed that she made a sacrifice of them to Saint-Lambert. When nearly eighty years of age, Madame de Houdetot still cried in agreeable verses: Et l'amour me console! Rien ne pourra me consoler de lui[473]. She never went to bed without striking the floor three times with her slipper and saying, "Good-night, dear!" to the late author of the _Saisons._ That was what the philosophy of the eighteenth century amounted to in 1803. The society of Madame de Houdetot, Diderot, Saint-Lambert, Rousseau, Grimm[474], and Madame d'Épinay rendered the Valley of Montmorency insupportable to me, and though, with regard to facts, I am very glad that a relic of the Voltairean times should have come under my notice, I do not regret those times. I have lately again seen the house in which Madame de Houdetot used to live at Sannois; it is now a mere empty shell, reduced to the four walls. A deserted hearth is always interesting; but what can we gather from hearth-stones by whose side beauty has never sat, nor the mother of a family, nor religion, and whose ashes, if they were not dispersed, would carry back the memory only to days which were capable of nought save destruction? *