the drama, painting and all the arts pursuing the same sentimental road to supply heated imaginations with factitious nourishment.[7] Rousseau, in labored periods, preaches the charms of an uncivilized existence, while other masters, between two madrigals, fancy the delight of sleeping naked in the primeval forest.  The lovers in “La Nouvelle Héloise” interchange passages of fine style through four volumes, whereupon a person “not merely methodical but prudent,” the Comtesse de Blot, exclaims, at a social gathering at the Duchesse de Chartres’, “a woman truly sensitive, unless of extraordinary virtue, could refuse nothing to the passion of Rousseau."[8] People collect in a dense crowd in the Exhibition around “L’Accordée de Village,” “La Cruche Cassée,” and the “Retour de nourrice,” with other rural and domestic idylls by Greuze; the voluptuous element, the tempting undercurrent of sensuality made perceptible in the fragile simplicity of his artless maidens, is a dainty bit for the libertine tastes which are kept alive beneath moral aspirations.[9] After these, Ducis, Thomas, Parny, Colardeau, Boucher, Delille, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Marmontel, Florian, the mass of orators, authors and politicians, the misanthrope Champfort, the logician La Harpe, the minister Necker, the versifiers and the imitators of Gessner and Young, the Berquins, the Bitaubés, nicely combed and bedizened, holding embroidered handkerchiefs to wipe away tears, are to marshal forth the universal eclogue down to the acme of the Revolution.  Marmontel’s “Moral Tales” appear in the columns of the “Mercure” for 1791 and 1792,[10] while the number following the massacres of September opens with verses “to the manes of my canary-bird. "

Consequently, in all the details of private life, sensibility displays its magniloquence.  A small temple to Friendship is erected in a park.  A little altar to Benevolence is set up in a private closet.  Dresses à la Jean-Jacques-Rousseau are worn “analogous to the principles of that author.”  Head-dresses are selected with “puffs au sentiment” in which one may place the portrait of one’s daughter, mother, canary or dog, the whole “garnished with the hair of one’s father or intimate friend."[11] People keep intimate friends for whom “they experience something so warm and so tender that it nearly amounts to a passion” and whom they cannot go three hours a day without seeing.  “Every time female companions interchange tender ideas the voice suddenly changes into a pure and languishing tone, each fondly regarding the other with approaching heads and frequently embracing,” and suppressing a yawn a quarter of an hour after, with a nap in concert, because they have no more to say.  Enthusiasm becomes an obligation.  On the revival of “Le père de famille” there are as many handkerchiefs counted as spectators, and ladies faint away.  “It is customary, especially for young women, to be excited, to turn pale, to melt into tears and, generally, to be seriously affected on encountering