(The very snap of the consonants can be heard.)
Madame d’Epinay was too true a disciple of Rousseau to follow him slavishly. Not only did she ignore his strictures upon reading, through the fear of being singular, and still more that of making an unfortunate experiment, but she was even ready to tolerate myths for the sake of morality, and to compare them with modern instances; on the other hand, it must be confessed that she only once talked of fairies, and regretted it afterwards.
Emilie herself has a child’s love of fairies; but she is made to reason about them:
“Mamma, you will make me umpire between you and the fairies,” says the intelligent little person, making the most of her dull game; and she obediently works it out against herself: “They were, perhaps, two fairies and a genii I met this morning. Well, no matter, Heaven bless them, I say, you are the fairy Luminous and have disenchanted me!”
The Mother never shrinks from this grave responsibility. Berquin, though he made war upon ghosts, was wise enough to let the fairies alone. At least he could laugh like one of them. But Madame d’Epinay, in her first Conversation with Emilie, finds it hard to be amused, and in the twelfth, the little girl declares: “In my whole life I never saw you play at anything”.
This, indeed, is a mother that sends Love himself to school:
| Emilie: | Mamma! Mamma! Let me come and kiss you. |
| Mamma: | Most willingly; but you will tell me upon what account! |
Madame de Genlis’s Adèle et Théodore, published in the same year as Emilie, gives her interpretation of Rousseau in the form of correspondence with a mother who desires to be enlightened, but as yet clings to the ordinary customs of Society:
“You prevent your children till the age of thirteen from reading Telemachus, Fontaine’s Fables and all such books, yet you would inspire them with a taste for reading! What books would you give them instead of those I have mentioned? Are they only to read the Arabian Nights and Fairy Tales till they are thirteen?”
The answer gives the author’s convictions about children’s books: