Nouvelle Héloïse, Julie ou la. Novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, written at Montmorency and inspired by his love for Sophie d' Houdetot. Published in 1761, it was an immediate best-seller (72 editions were published before 1800). It is written in letter form; many readers took the letters to be authentic, and Rousseau discusses this question teasingly in his second preface.
The scene is set on the shores of Lake Geneva. Julie, the loving daughter of the Baron d'Étange, falls in love with her tutor, the commoner Saint-Preux, but their wedding is prevented by her father's social prejudice. The Baron's violence causes her to miscarry. Exhorted by Julie's more playful cousin Claire and by his virtuous English friend Milord Edouard Bomston (whose own love story was omitted from the definitive version of the novel), Saint-Preux leaves for Paris. Remorseful at her mother's death, Julie agrees to sacrifice her love and marries her father's friend, the benevolent philosophe Wolmar; she experiences a religious conversion during the ceremony. Her stricken lover now joins an expedition round the world; on his return, he finds Julie, Wolmar, and their children installed on an estate at Clarens, at the centre of a happily productive rural community. In spite of his amorous misgivings, he is admitted to the chosen company. Wolmar puts the former lovers to the test by leaving them alone; they triumph over temptation. But the idyll is fragile; Julie, who has written to Saint-Preux: ‘le pays des chimères est en ce monde le seul digne d'être habité’, dies willingly as a result of saving a child from drowning.
Rousseau thus combined his original story of passionate love and protest against the social order with an edifying tale of moral and social regeneration, even making the union of Julie and Wolmar an emblem of the reconciliation of religion and philosophy. Many letters express ideas dear to the author, such as Saint-Preux's report on the happy Swiss mountain-dwellers or his condemnation of the Paris opera. The ménage à trois embodies one of Jean-Jacques's dreams, and the patriarchal world of Clarens is a vision of the happy state denied to him, an ideal blend of nature and culture.
[Peter France]
