(All page references are to the translation of Julie by Philip Stewart and Jean Vache)
In the final pages of Rousseau’s Julie, St. Preux fails a critical test not because he does not meet the expectations of Milord Edward or Wolmar but because he lives up to those expectations all too well. As Milord and Wolmar had hoped, St. Preux proved himself a true friend by preventing Laura Pisana from becoming Milord’s wife, the Lady Bomston. The problem in their opinion was that Laura had once been a prostitute and though she had redeemed her earlier mistakes by her subsequent virtuous conduct, she was not “spotless”. (Letter to Wolmar from Milord Edward, pp. 533-538) What makes St. Preux prevention of the marriage a disappointment, however, is that St. Preux himself had been rejected as a husband for Julie by her father on the grounds that he was low-born. That St. Preux was virtuous did not matter to Julie’s father either.
It may be argued that the two cases are different, but it is Julie herself who makes the identification between Laura and that younger Julie who had conceived a child out of wedlock with St. Preux, only to lose the child in a miscarriage caused by a merciless beating from her father. Julie believes this time love and virtue have won the day:
So Lady Bomston will come here? Here, my angel? What do you think of that? After all, what a phenomenon must this astonishing woman be whose education undid her, whose heart has saved her, and for whom love was the path to virtue? Who should admire her more than I who did just the reverse, and was led astray solely by my inclination, when everything conspired to lead me in the right path? I did not sink as low it is true; but did I raise myself up like her? Did I avoid as many pitfalls and make as many sacrifices? From the lowest degree of shame she was able to climb back up to the highesy degree of honor; she is a hundred times more respectable than if she had never been criminal. She is sensible and virtuous: what more does she need to be like us? If there is no recovering from youthful faults, what right have I to more indulgence, before whom must I hope to find mercy, and to what honor could I pretend by refusing to honor her. (Letter to Claire, p. 514)
Julie does have hesitations about the marriage but recognizes that her hesitations are caused by opinion:
O opinion, opinion! How difficult it is to take its yoke! It always leads us to injustice; past good is erased by present evil; will past evil never be erased by any good? (Letter to Claire, p. 514)
At the time that Julie is writing this letter to Claire, she is not aware of St. Preux’s machinations that have actually prevented the marriage, efforts that prove him to be a worthy protégé of the manipulative Wolmar. Julie apparently dies in ignorance of the truth. That St. Preux has fallen ill and is unable to return before Julie dies – indeed, that St. Preux is not heard from at all after Julie’s death -- seems a fitting absence for one who ends his part in this story by becoming other than who he was when he first merited the love of Julie precisely on account of his love of virtue and refusal to acquiesce to opinion.
Julie’s story ends with a final authentic act: the confession of her incurable love for St. Preux. What she does not know is that St. Preux for his part has been completely cured, turned inside out by the manipulations of Wolmar and Milord Edward. He now values honor, social status and opinion more highly than virtue, yet still thinks of himself as acting virtuously. Julie herself acknowledges in her final letter to St. Preux that she too lived in what she calls a salutary delusion:
I have long deluded myself. That delusion for me was salutary; it collapses at the moment when I no longer need it. You have believed I was cured, and I thought I was. Let us give thanks to him who made this error last for as long as it was useful, . . . Aye, however much I wanted to stifle the first sentiment that brought me alive, it cystallized into my heart. There it awakens at the moment when it is no longer to be feared; it sustains me when my strength fails me; it revives me as I lie dying. (Letter to St. Preux from Julie, p. 611).
The tragedy of Rousseau’s Julie is that in the end love is able to survive only by denying itself. Julie’s earlier maxim that they should not live to love each other, but love each other to live (p. 137) has likewise proven itself in Julie’s death to be a delusion. It is only in dying that love claims its truth. It is an old and oft-told story.
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