Page:Books and men.djvu/126

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BOOKS AND MEN.

with this guileless pair. "They understood each other without words, and saw their whole hearts in each other's eyes."

As for the great wave of emotionalism that followed in Rousseau's train, it was a pure make-believe, like every other sentiment that bubbled on the seething surface of French society. Avarice and honor alone were real. To live like a profligate and to die like a hero were the two accomplishments common to every grand seigneur in the country. For the rest, there was a series of fads,—simplicity, benevolence, philosophy, passion, asceticism; Voltaire one day, Rousseau the next; Arcadian virtues and court vices jumbled fantastically together; the cause of the people on every tongue, and the partridges hatching in the peasant's corn; Marie Antoinette milking a cow, and the infant Madame Royale with eighty nurses and attendants; great ladies, with jewels in their hair, on their bosoms, and on their silken slippers, laboriously earning a few francs by picking out gold threads from scraps of tarnished bullion; everybody anxiously asking everybody else, "What shall we do to be amused?" and the real answer to all