[359] It is a singular coincidence that this was exactly the sum which Johnson mentioned to Boswell as capable of affording decent subsistence in London during the early middle eighteenth century.
[360] Songe de Platon, Bababec et les Fakirs, Aventure de la Mémoire, Les Aveugles Juges des Conteurs, Aventure Indienne, and Voyage de la Raison.
[361] It is only fair to mention in this place, and in justice to a much abused institution, that this Babylonian story is said to be the only thing of its kind and its author that escaped the Roman censorship. If this is true, the unfeathered perroquets were not so spiteful as the feathered ones too often are. Or perhaps each chuckled at the satire on his brethren.
[362] As with other controverted points, not strictly relevant, it is permissible for us to neglect protests about la légende des philosophes and the like. Of course Rousseau was not only, at one time or another, the personal enemy of Voltaire and Diderot—he was, at one time or another, the personal enemy of everybody, including (not at any one but at all times) himself—but held principles very different from theirs. Yet their names will always be found together: and for our object the junction is real.
[363] Not the Abbé, who had been dead for some years, but a Genevese professor who saw a good deal of Jean-Jacques in his later days.
[364] "For short" La Nouvelle Héloïse has been usually adopted. I prefer Julie as actually the first title, and for other reasons with which it is unnecessary to trouble the reader.
[365] She dies after slipping into the lake in a successful attempt to rescue one of her children; but neither is drowned, and she does not succumb rapidly enough for "shock" to account for it, or slowly enough for any other intelligible malady to hold its course.
[366] There is another curious anticipation of Dickens here: for Julie, as Dora does with Agnes, entreats Claire to "fill her vacant place"—though, by the way, not with her husband. And a third parallel, between Saint-Preux and Bradley Headstone, need not be quite farcical.
[367] You may tear out Introductions, if you do it neatly; and this I say, having written many.
[368] Also Rousseau, without meaning it, has made him by no means a fool. When, on learning from his wife and daughter that Saint-Preux had been officiating as "coach," he asked if this genius was a gentleman, and on hearing that he was not, replied, "What have you paid him, then?" it was not, as the novelist and his hero took it, in their vanity, to be, mere insolence of caste. M. d'Étange knew perfectly well that though he could not trust a French gentleman with his wife, there was not nearly so much danger with his daughter—while a roturier was not only entitled to be paid, and might accept pay without derogation, but was not unlikely, as the old North Country saying goes, to take it in malt if he did not receive it in meal.