harpsichord with three fingers of a palsied hand, always remained to her a type of art above all others.

The first volume of these memoirs gives interesting notice of the friendships which surrounded Madame Dupin during her married life. These embraced various celebrities, historical and literary. Her husband was the congenial friend of the best minds of the day, and was able, among other things, to procure her the difficult pleasure of an interview with Jean Jacques Rousseau, then living near her in great spleen and retirement. We cannot do better than to give the relation of this in her own words, as preserved by her grand-daughter. It is highly characteristic of the parties and of the times.

"Before I had seen Rousseau, I had read the 'Nouvelle Héloïse' in one breath, and at the last pages I found myself so overcome that I wept and sobbed. My husband gently rallied me for this; but that day I could only cry from morning till evening. During this, M. de Francueil, with the address and the grace which he knew how to put into everything, ran to find Jean Jacques. I do not know how he managed it, but he carried him off, he brought him, without having communicated to me his intention.

"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.

M. Dupin de Francueil lived with great, but generous extravagance, and, as his widow averred, "ruined himself in the most amiable manner in the world." He died, leaving large estates in great confusion, from which his widow and young son were compelled to "accept the poverty" of seventy-five thousand livres of annual income,—a sum which the Revolution, at a later day, greatly reduced. Till its outbreak, Madame Dupin lived in peace and affluence, though not on the grand scale of earlier days,—devoting herself chiefly to the care and education of her son, Maurice, in which latter task she secured the services of a young abbé, who afterwards prudently became the Citizen Deschartres, and who continued in the service of the family during the rest of a tolerably long life. This personage plays too important a part in the memoirs to be passed over without special notice. He continued to be the faithful teacher and companion of Maurice, until the exigencies of military life removed the latter from his control. He was also the man of business of Madame Dupin, and, at a later day, the preceptor of George herself, who, with childish petulance, bestowed on him the sobriquet of grand homme, in consequence, she tells us, of his omnicompétence and his air of importance. "My grandmother," she says, "had no presentiment, that, in confiding to him the education of her son, she was securing the tyrant, the saviour, and the friend of her whole remaining life." We would gladly give here in full George's portrait of her tutor; but if we should stop to sketch all the admirable photography of this work, our review would become a volume. We can only borrow a trait or two, and pass on to the consideration of other matters.

"He had been good-looking; but I am sure that no one, even in his best days, could have looked at him without laughing, so clearly was the word pedant written in all the lines of his face and in every movement of his person. To be complete, he should have been ignorant, gourmand, and cowardly. But, far from this, he was very learned, temperate, and madly courageous. He had all the great qualities of the soul, joined to an insufferable disposition, and a self-satisfaction which amounted almost to delirium. But what devotion, what zeal, what a tender and generous soul!"

In the intervals of his necessary occupations he studied medicine and surgery, in the latter of which he attained considerable skill. In the many subsequent years of his country life, he made these accomplishments very useful to the village folk. No stress of weather or unseasonableness of hours could detain him from attending the sick, when summoned; but being obliged, as George says, to be ridiculous as well as sublime in all things, he was wont to beat his patients when they were bold enough to offer him money for their cure, and even made missile weapons of the poultry and game which they brought him in acknowledgment of his services, assailing them with blows and harder words, till they fled, amused or angry. Maurice, his first pupil, was a delicate and indolent child, and showed little robustness of character till his early manhood, when the necessity of a career forced him into the ranks of the great army.

The first threatenings of the Revolution found in Madame Dupin an unalarmed observer. As a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau, she could not but detest the abuses of the Court; she shared, too, the general personal alienation of the aristocracy from the German woman, as they called Marie Antoinette. She admired, in turn, the probity of Necker and the genius of Mirabeau; but the current of disorder finally found its way to her, and swept away her household peace among the innumerable wrecks that marked its passage. Implicated as the depository of some papers supposed to be of treasonable character, she was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, her son and Deschartres being officially separated from her and detained at Passy. The imprisonment lasted some months, and its tedium was beguiled by the most fervent love-letters between the boy of sixteen and his mother. The sorrow of this separation, George says, metamorphosed the sickly, spoiled child into a fervent and resolute youth, whose subsequent career was full of courage and self-denial. Of the Revolution she writes:—

"In my eyes, it is one of the phases of evangelical life: a tumultuous, bloody life, terrible at certain moments, full of convulsions, of delirium, and of sobbing. It is the violent contest of the principle of equality preached by Jesus, and passing, now like a radiant light, now like a burning torch, from hand to hand, to our own days, against the old pagan world, which is not destroyed, which will not be for a long time yet, in spite of the mission of Christ, and so many other divine missions, in spite of so many stakes, scaffolds, and martyrs. What is there, then, to astonish us in the vertigo which seized all minds at the period of