To account
for this contradiction, you must recall what I told you about the
effect produced on the Abbe Aubert by the _Profession de Foi du Vicaire
Savoyard_. Moreover, you must be aware that, in poetic souls, mysticism
and doubt often reign side by side. Jean Jacques himself furnishes a
striking example of this, and you know what sympathies he stirred among
priests and nobles, even when he was chastising them so unmercifully.
What miracles may not conviction work when helped by sublime eloquence!
Edmee had drunk of this living fount with all the eagerness of an ardent
soul. In her rare visits to Paris she had sought for spirits in sympathy
with her own. There, however, she had found so many shades of opinion,
so little harmony, and--despite the prevailing fashion--so many
ineradicable prejudices, that she had returned with a yet deeper love to
her solitude and her poetic reveries under the old oaks in the park. She
would even then speak of her illusions, and--with a good sense beyond
her years, perhaps, too, beyond her sex--she refused all opportunities
of direct intercourse with the philosophers whose writings made up her
intellectual life.
"I am somewhat of a Sybarite," she would say with a smile. "I would
rather have a bouquet of roses arranged for me in a vase in the early
morning, than go and gather them myself from out their thorns in the
heat of the sun."
As a fact, this remark about her sybaritism was only a jest.
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