Note 300 — Chapter VII

Conf., ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (Mém., ii. 326), writing to Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account for this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (Rev. des Deux Mondes, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between her letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent to Grimm, and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never perfectly master of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the revolutionary schools, as might indeed have been expected in a writer with his predilections for the seventeenth century, rashly hints (Causeries, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The publication from the autograph originals sets this at rest.