The lively emotion provoked by the "Nouvelle Heloise" 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
abbe, 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.
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