This article, now somewhat amended, originally appeared in Romanic Review,
Volume 86 (1995), pp. 36-43, © The Trustees of Columbia University.


Half-Title or Julie beheaded

 

by Philip Stewart





"Julie ou": head and frail articulation, separated from their body by a certain kind of critical terror. Imagine a book on Richardson that referred throughout to Virtue Rewarded and The History of a Young Lady without ever mentioning Pamela or Clarissa. This is exactly what has happened in the case of Rousseau's novel. One could read all the way through any number of volumes devoted to it without ever learning -- without encountering any suggestion -- that its author gave it any other title than "La nouvelle Héloïse." The old "Classiques Larousse" abridgment, through which generations of French and other students first made contact with the work, nowhere so informs the reader, even though editor J.-E. Morel occasionally refers familiarly to "la Julie" (but also "l'Héloïse"). Even the authoritative Pléiade edition(1) mentions no Julie on its title page; the recent Folio edition does, but not on its cover -- as if the publisher feared confusing a potential reader (i.e., buyer) with an unrecognizable (i.e., real) title.(2)

There is thus some pertinence to this question: how did a novel entitled Julie come to be known exclusively by its subtitle? What is it about Julie ou that so taxes the collective memory?

First point of call in this inquiry is naturally the historical record, and in particular the author's own references to his book. It is more than slightly significant that, as J. S. Spink remarked, "the Abélard-Héloïse model . . . appeared in the title at the very last moment" (165), for this tells us that, far from being the informing concept that generated the text, it was, if not an afterthought, at least a late comparison -- probably the result of reading Colardeau's 1758 translation of Pope's Eloïsa to Abelard. Rousseau's first working title, Julie, ou lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes indeed "corresponds more closely to the substance of the book" (Spink 165). Rousseau recast that title's first part as Julie, ou la moderne Héloïse, and only as the typesetting was under way in early 1760 did he change this to Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.(3)

From this point until the publication a year later there was never any doubt that the full title was to be an amalgam of two parts, the first being Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse and the second Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes. Rousseau was highly specific about the layout of the title page,(4) as he was about the rather curious decision to separate these two titles and place Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse separately on the half-title page (probably to avoid too cluttered a title page)(5); this detail was to have, as we shall see, long-range consequences. In fact, Julie dominates, appearing in significantly larger type than ou la nouvelle Héloïse. At the same time he specified that the running head "Lettres de deux amants" be changed to "La nouvelle Héloïse", and this was done.(6)

This fluctuation or hesitation is further evident in discussion of the long "second" preface often referred to as the "Préface dialoguée." When he informs Rey about it, mainly in order to specify that he will not include it in the first Amsterdam edition, he calls it Préface de Julie(7); and while he published it under the name Préface de la Nouvelle Héloïse: ou entretien sur les romans, its avertissement begins: "Ce dialogue ou entretien supposé était d'abord destiné à servir de préface aux Lettres de deux amants." It would seem that Rousseau was ambivalent about which appelation to favor. The reason Lettres de deux amants holds equal footing in this contest is that Rousseau generally avoided the term roman, referring frequently in the "second" preface, for example, to ces Lettres and ce Recueil, in order to favor the premise that the letters could be real.

This apparent ambiguity of title is, not surprisingly, reflected in references by his contemporaries. Le Mercure's first notice, going by the title page alone, lists it as Lettres de deux amants . . . but the extensive summary given in the following issue instead uses the half-title Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.(8) All three installments of summary and extracts in the Journal Encyclopédique appear under the sole title Lettres de deux amants . . . (9)

This is not to say that Rousseau did not frequently use "la nouvelle Héloïse" or just "l'Héloïse." In Lettres de la montagne we find one mention of "Nouvelle Héloïse" and two of "Héloïse"; in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques it is always "Héloïse" (eight times) or "Nouvelle Héloïse" (one time). But the preponderance in fact leans towards Julie. In The Confessions, where Rousseau talks most at length about it, he calls it "la nouvelle Héloïse" in five places, simply "l'Héloïse" in five others, and just plain "Julie" in fifteen. Elsewhere I have located about an equal number of "Héloïse" and "Julie." We have no concordance for the correspondence; my sampling, taken from 1760-1761 when the book is most often mentioned, though highly imperfect, is nonetheless sufficient to indicate the general trend: what we find is that while the publisher, Marc-Michel Rey, nearly always says Julie, the many avid readers who write to Rousseau when the novel comes out use all three designations, indeed often more than one in a single letter (I have counted among them 13 Héloïse, 22 Nouvelle Héloïse and 25 Julie). Rousseau does likewise in his own letters, though the most frequent seems to be Julie: my rough count yields two "Héloïse," four "Nouvelle Héloïse," and eleven "Julie." In short, while allusion to the book by means of its subtitle was common, nothing at all suggests that "la nouvelle Héloïse" had become, in the eyes of either Rousseau or his public, anything like its true, unique and definitive title. Yet that is what it has been considered for most of the time since.

The first revision, which was ultimately to exercise an extended influence, was the introduction in 1764, in the editions bearing the Duchesne imprint (Neufchâtel and Paris), of the words "La Nouvelle Héloïse" at the beginning of the title page, which was then followed by an "ou" before "Lettres de deux amants . . . ." These modified title pages are all still accompanied by the half-title Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse(10); even so, the change was surely not made with Rousseau's permission. Indeed he was generally quite clear about matters he had decided upon; the same 1764 editions, for example, replaced Gravelot's twelfth engraving with a new one of Julie falling into the water ("L'amour maternel"), which Rousseau found grotesque.(11)

Subsequently, when the half-title was dropped in a collected edition of Rousseau's works,(12) imitations of this title page beginning "La nouvelle Héloïse ou" were left, as it were, exposed; and so it is that erosion by erosion Julie's main title more frequently (but still almost exclusively in collected editions) appeared as simply "La nouvelle Héloïse."(13) All of the other 113 editions or re-emissions between 1761 and 1800 bear Julie before "La nouvelle Héloïse" on their half-title or title page.(14)

The most egregious act of emendation was perpetrated in 1761 by the English translator William Kenrick, who not only titled the book Eloisa pure and simple(15) but substituted throughout the name of Eloisa for that of Julie -- this being, as he assures in his preface, "a matter of no importance to the reader." In this operation, Julie simply disappears and the simile (which only comes into play one single time in the text of the novel) brazenly replaces the character. Moreover, the heroine thereby ceases to be the nouvelle Heloise: their conflation actually robs the comparison of some of its explicit force. Needless to say, this was -- literally -- taking the "Héloïse" moniker too literally. Restitution was made in 1773 in an otherwise only slightly modified Kenrick translation titled Julia: or, The New Eloisa.(16) The first Eloisa version was re-issued fifteen or so times in England through 1810, and even blindly taken up again in a reprint by Woodstock Books of Oxford in 1989.
 

The principal motivation behind this gradual slippage was probably the fact that a title as slim as Julie was disconcerting in terms of contemporary practice. It was one thing to call a work Mémoires du comte de Comminge or La princesse de Clèves, and something else again to give it a name unknown to readers, much less merely a first name. La vie de Marianne (1731) sports an aggressive anonymity, but it continued with the fuller justification: . . . ou les aventures de Madame la comtesse de ***; in this context, the operative clause is definitely "Madame la comtesse de ***" that is, someone. We might recall that Nivelle de La Chaussée created a small sensation in 1741 when he gave a play the unadorned title Mélanide: it was a woman's name, obviously enough, but it didn't mean anything. As Lanson remarks:
 
 

Cela étonna. C'était bon pour la tragédie: les héros de l'histoire et de la fable sont connus. Mais un nom inconnu, un nom de l'invention de l'auteur, ni symbolique ni grotesque, insignifiant, incolore, qui n'annonçait ni l'intention morale de l'auteur, ni les caractères, ni le sujet, on n'avait jamais donné de titre pareil à une comédie.(17)

Médée could pass; it is full of meaning: but Mélanide? Mélanide had no information value. It is not hard to see that Julie was in this sense highly unconventional and would appear very simply to lack the ballast necessary to stabilize such a massive book. (It is likely for the same reason that, in similar semantic situations, titles today are often reduplicated for implicit reinforcement: witness the soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and the films Europa, Europe and Olivier Olivier.)(18)

Julie: the name, unsung, is devoid of inherent content. This is partly, to be sure, what Rousseau intended: if anything, it merely suggests the Alpine simplicity echoed in the assertively modest anonymity of that other title, Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes. But that would also explain why he added a subtitle which on the contrary is heavily invested with meaning: it brings with it the whole mass of a century-long fascination with Abelard and Heloise, a mound of plays and poems and other adaptations of their sorrows and letters.(19) "La nouvelle Héloïse" is as powerful and substantial as "Julie" is slight; it stakes a claim to grandeur which counterbalances the name of a simple girl; after the two modest, acute syllables of "Julie"(20) it trumpets with six (a classical hémistiche): this is an Heloise for our times, a modern Heloise. Moreover, the fact that "la nouvelle Héloïse" stands in apposition to Julie makes it convenient to use the one in place of the other, which one cannot so easily do with a moral paraphrase such as "Virtue Rewarded."

We can therefore believe it was the association with Heloise, so much more imposing for a reader of 1761 than today, that made the label seem so appealing, even overdetermined. It carried a pungent redolence of scandal; Rousseau in his preface is quite explicit about saying that his title stands forth specifically as a warning to virgins: "Jamais fille chaste n'a lu de Romans; et j'ai mis à celui-ci un titre assez décidé pour qu'en l'ouvrant on sût à quoi s'en tenir. Celle qui, malgré ce titre, en osera lire une seule page, est une fille perdue" (emphasis added).(21) But at the same time, the appealing if not alluring titre assez décidé was a lure, promising a story of lust and redemption: in relative terms, it was something like a blaring "Lust! Crime! Passion!" on a twentieth-century pulp cover.

For some, doubtless, to refer to the book as "Héloïse" or "La nouvelle Héloïse" functioned as a sign of approval, of assent to the author's implied invitation to find in Julie the true modern embodiment of tragic medieval passion and/or austere spiritual glory. It is understandable that, given all these active connotations, "la nouvelle Héloïse" was catchy in a way that Julie obviously could not be. That does not, however, make it the true title.

There were sometimes, moreover, less admiring motivations at work. Voltaire insists on "Nouvelle Héloïse" precisely because he, on the contrary, thinks the book so trivial as to render its pretentious connection with the Heloise legend inherently burlesque.(22) His use of the subtitle thus goes hand in hand with his sarcasm about Helvetic values in general and especially Julie's Swiss nobility (the baron d'Étange seems to be an embodiment of the very kind of petty-noble pomposity Voltaire had just satirized in the person of the Baron de Thunder-ten-tronckh).(23) Thus it encapsulates much of the satirical tenor of his résumé of a plot that features an "espèce de valet suisse" whom he repeatedly calls Jean-Jacques. But there is more: Voltaire refers more exactly to "La nouvelle Héloïse (ou Aloïsia)" because he wants to imply a scurrilous consanguinity between Rousseau's title and Nicolas Chorier's infamous "Meursius français" which went by various names of which one was Aloïsia.(24) Such a conflation, which hinted at the indecencies or even obscenities Julie contained,(25) would have appeared particularly hilarious to a Voltaire greatly exasperated with what he considered to be Rousseau's self-righteous antics.

Similar sentiments lay behind La nouvelle Héloïse dévoilée by one Milon.(26) Like Voltaire, Milon disparages both protagonists; he scoffs at St. Preux's "ingénuité helvétique" and calls him things like "petit scélérat," "tartufe," "amant extravagant," and "pauvre diable de précepteur"; even Claire is "perfide," a "vile complaisante." He derides the moralism of "la friponne" Julie, and underscores his satire by referring to her (rather than just the book) as "la nouvelle Héloïse." Moreover, like Voltaire, Milon identifies the author himself -- for whom he also has such unambiguous epithets as "misanthrope atrabilaire" and "rusé charlatan" -- with "l'aimable héros de la nouvelle Héloïse."

The moral anthologist Formey had something quite opposite in mind in publishing L'esprit de Julie.(27) He wanted to serve the didactic purposes that informed the novel, minus the seductive and problematizing matrix with which Rousseau had surrounded them: L'esprit de Julie is thus an expurgated Julie, or rather an extracted and partially amended one, a quintessence of right thinking ("un miel pur et exquis"). He expresses this intention, pertinently for our analysis, precisely in terms of a contrast between the two titles: "Il fallait faire une Julie imitable et digne d'être imitée: la Nouvelle Héloïse, au contraire, est inimitable, et indigne d'être imitée" (vi-vii). Formey's associations with these names are quite unlike those suggested earlier: to him, what is prominent about the Heloise association is evidently not its prestige and tragic grandeur but its seductive contagion. What Formey is offering, indeed urging upon, the reader is precisely Julie without Heloise: for in this perspective, the name of Julie alongside Heloise seems to ring clear as a bell, like that of an angel who must be divorced from her sinful sponsor.(28)

We can probably credit the continuing cult of Abelard and Heloise with ultimately driving Julie out of circulation (their remains were not removed from the Paraclet abbey to the gothic tomb in the Père Lachaise until 1817). Madame de Merteuil may be referring to Rousseau when she mentions reading "une lettre d'Héloïse"(29) and in any case elsewhere clearly identifies "Héloïse" as a novel(30); in Restif, at about the same time, we also find it called "l'Héloïse."(31) La Harpe refers only to "La nouvelle Héloïse", but Sénac de Meilhan instead says Julie.(32) Irregularly, the reference thus comes to be fixed as "La nouvelle Héloïse", which is what we find in Villemain and Sainte-Beuve. Chateaubriand and Lamartine differ only in adding an occasional, informal "l'Héloïse," the version Staël and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre use most of the time without even the article. Stendhal for his part writes "la Nouvelle-Héloïse," usually with a hyphen.(33)

The efficiency of the phrase must be recognized. "La nouvelle Héloïse" canonizes Heloise, making her the quintessential model for feminine passion and abdication, while beatifying Julie by making of her a reincarnation -- or reinvention -- of that paradigm. (It also reveals by contrast how clumsy was Kenrick's wholesale substitution of one name for the other, which completely short-circuited this rather elegant semiotic process.) This double movement of course only reinforces and elevates the gesture Rousseau had already accomplished in coining the expression. "La nouvelle Héloïse" is the romantic apotheosis of Julie.

By the time modern academic histories of literature, and along with them books and articles devoted specifically to Julie, began appearing about 1890, "La nouvelle Héloïse" was long since definitively ensconced as the novel's official title. One cannot learn from Brunetière (Études critiques sur l'histoire de la littérature française), Doumic (Histoire de la littérature française) or Lanson (Histoire de la littérature française) that Rousseau ever authored a work named Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. In the late nineteenth century, when the teaching of "notre littérature" was to scholars of all political persuasions an inherently patriotic endeavor, referring to books familiarly, without the bother of bibliographical details, was one of the ways in which the urbane man of letters manifested his intimacy with the great writers of the past.(34) But this propensity is not the principal explanation for the universality of "la nouvelle Héloïse", for it figures not as a subtitle at all but as the book's real title; it is Julie on the contrary that sometimes serves as familiar nickname. In Le Breton's eighty-page chapter devoted to Julie in Le roman au dix-huitième siècle, he mentions Julie only once: "Saint-Preux s'est épris de son écolière, Julie d'Étange, comme autrefois Abélard avait aimé Héloïse; de là le sous-titre, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse" (248). In truth, however, the token word sous-titre in this sentence doesn't faze him a bit; it is not thought to be a subtitle at all and never functions as such.

Daniel Mornet, in his countless pages devoted to Julie, never calls it anything other than "La nouvelle Héloïse." The whole of his La nouvelle Héloïse de J.-J. Rousseau: étude et analyse contains but one single mention of Julie (64). Even more astonishingly, Julie does not even figure on the title page of his landmark, four-volume "Grands Écrivains de la France" edition of 1925; were it not for his inclusion of facsimiles of the original title pages, this information would be lacking entirely. One is tempted to conclude that Mornet in some sense did not know what the book's true title was. In the case of Lanson, we needn't even conjecture; he clearly did not know: for in an article on Rousseau for La Grande Encyclopédie in which he alludes twice to "l'Héloïse" and even once to "Julie", he once explicitly gives the full title of the work, and here is the way it comes out: "La Nouvelle Héloïse, ou Lettres de deux amants habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes" (1064)!(35) This corrupted version of the title corresponds, as was shown above, to an unauthorized transfer of the subtitle in some editions from the half-title page to the regular title page(36); in this form, no place in the title at all; time, ideology and slipshod habits have simply obliterated her. It goes to show that the scholarly bad habit is the worst kind, since it never occurs to some scholars that they could be in the business of perpetuating misinformation.

As if the apotheosis of "la nouvelle Héloïse" were not complete enough, it remained for Bernard Guyon, annotator of the Pléiade edition, to fetishize it ultimately as "ces trois mots destinés à devenir illustres" (Introduction, p. lxviii). So riveted is he on them that he cannot fathom what could have come over Rousseau the day he sent his protectrice, the Maréchale de Luxembourg, a copy -- the last of those he wrote by hand -- the title page of which failed to include these three magic words: in Guyon's terms, it "ne porte pas encore le titre fameux, mais seulement le sous-titre: Julie | ou lettres de deux amans | habitans etc."(37) In other words, this manuscript in essence had no title: a priori, Julie, ou lettres de deux amants cannot be understood as in any sense the book's rightful name, of which it is but a distant glimmer; it conceals a hiatus behind which imminent if not yet manifest, must lie le fameux titre. That Rousseau should omit what to Guyon is "le titre" must then amount to something of a mystification. In this rather extreme construction of the matter, everything but "la nouvelle Héloïse" is by definition a subtitle. Julie then is only a sort of pre- or proto-title, a prête-nom awaiting its full revelation. A less prepossessed investigator might, if he thought about it, draw rather different conclusions. Here, "la nouvelle Héloïse" constitutes a predestined apotheosis that shapes the whole inspired process: "S'il a finalement inscrit à la suite de Julie, et avant Lettres de deux amans, ce sous-titre promis à un glorieux destin, c'est sans doute à cause de la diffusion croissante du 'mythe' dans la littérature au cours de la première moitié du siècle" (1338).(39) But the sublimity of Guyon's glorieux destin is purely tautological: its only referent is precisely the romantic mythification of "la nouvelle Héloïse", of which Guyon's phrases are themselves an instance. Curiously, Peggy Kamuf accuses the Pléiade edition of trivializing the Héloïse connection(40); actually, the reverse is true: it has done everything possible to depreciate Julie.

The Pléiade editors compound this process by making Julie invisible in their edition of the Confessions: for, acting on the assumption that "Julie" is not a title but a nickname of sorts, do not put it in italics, whereas they do of course for any expression containing "Héloïse." Thus a simple "editorial" detail ("nous avons souligné les titres d'ouvrages cités par Rousseau, estimant qu'il ne s'agit là que d'une question de présentation")(41) -- particularly since it applies to the standard reference edition -- perpetuates the same old prejudice. The genuinely mythic power of "la nouvelle Héloïse" prevents even good scholars from seeing the evidence, so that they naïvely collaborate in actively suppressing it.

It is clear from a recent overview of Rousseau scholarship by Raymond Trousson(42) that it is still de bon ton to refer sometimes to "la Julie" and "l'Héloïse"(43) to indicate how familiar it is -- the way critics often condescendingly say "Jean-Jacques" rather than Rousseau -- while mostly sticking with "La nouvelle Héloïse" so people will know what you are talking about. Julie is rarely if ever used in any scholarly title until quite recently, and you can be sure that if you want to locate any references to it in any index on earth written before 1980 or even sometimes later -- including the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale -- you had better look under N and not J. A rare exception to that rule is the recent A Rousseau Dictionary by N. J. H. Dent, in which the listing for "Nouvelle Héloïse" refers the reader to "Julie"; yet even this author usually replaces Julie with "La nouvelle Héloïse" within the text of the articles. I can cite another book where, even though bibliographical scrupulousness leads the author to give all page references in the footnotes under the form "Julie, etc.," he never refers to it in the main body of the text as anything but "la Nouvelle Héloïse."(44) Yet another recent book on Rousseau lists "(Julie ou) La Nouvelle Héloïse" in the index, but does so under the letter N for good measure.(45) Such schizophrenia is a gauge of the depths of the problem. Is there any other literary work that is formally, not casually, designated exclusively by its subtitle?

None of the explanations suggested here can fully rationalize the way scholars and critics inexcusably continue such a practice in our day. The shock to literary conventions has long since worn off; if a book can be called Histoire d'O then one can hardly be made uneasy by the likes of Julie. To continue in these circumstances to call Rousseau's novel "La nouvelle Héloïse" is, just as in Kenrick's wholesale substitution, to hypostatize a metaphor to no good purpose. One can easily enough understand the advantages of referring to Manon Lescaut instead of Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, or Cleveland in the place of Le philosophe anglais ou histoire de M. Cleveland, fils naturel de Cromwell: in these typical cases the nickname is shorter (indeed it is not necessarily a subtitle at all), and it does refer to the principal character. But in saying "La nouvelle Héloïse" one incongruously opts for a nickname that is longer and abandons the heroine in favor of her idealization. Would one refer to La destinée and L'optimisme in lieu of Zadig or Candide?

It is, in my view, a deplorable practice ever to publish works without their complete titles, even Les égarements du cœur et de l'esprit stripped of its "ou mémoires de M. de Meilcour" (Folio, 1977) or Le paysan parvenu without "ou les mémoires de M***" (Garnier-Flammarion, 1965). The latter, to be sure, is less crucial: the subtitle really provides little new information except that of the autobiographical form; but it makes no sense in the former case to deprive a reader of the fact that Meilcour's name is given as part of the title.

Actually publishing such a work shorn of its authentic title is even more serious, and by the same token referring to it critically in this manner. If one can say Pamela and Clarissa, then one can say Julie. It is more accurate; that's all there is to it.
 

P.S. Who invented the hyphen in Saint-Preux? Not Rousseau, whose always wrote "St. Preux." Yet the form Saint-Preux seems even more universal than "La nouvelle Héloïse"; the rare scholars who use the book's true title still write its hero's name as "Saint-Preux." Henri Coulet, whose own text (twice issued, in Pléiade and Folio) consistently -- and faithfully -- records "St. Preux," somehow cannot resist, when he himself mentions the character, invariably changing this name to "Saint-Preux"! In fact the hyphen (like most hyphens in proper names) was an innovation of the early nineteenth century.(46)

Does it matter? In a more subtle way than the title, yes. Saint-Preux is a name and St. Preux is a saint. Here is an illustration of the difference it makes, in a simple but typical critical remark: "the 'contrived name' of Saint-Preux contains two important elements of the general concept of virtue: saint, implying saintliness; and preux, which suggests prowess."(47) This would make sense if the name were Saint-Preux; but it isn't; the critic is himself misled by a tradition that has arbitrarily imposed "Saint-Preux." For "saint" (as opposed to "Saint-") does not imply saintliness; it means saint.

Perhaps this does not change in a major way the word-play, in the central trio's playful diction, whereby the roturier hero becomes loyal chevalier and by the same process has his mock-saintly halo conferred upon him. But it matters connotatively that he is not Monsieur Saint-Preux -- in the first half of the novel he can't be a monsieur by any measure -- but St. Preux, interpret that as one may. But even if it made no discernable difference, why should anyone write "Saint-Preux" when Rousseau himself did not?(48)

 

Philip Stewart

Duke University
 
 

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Sénac de Meilhan, Gabriel. L'émigré. In Romanciers du XVIIIe siècle, René Étiemble, editor. Paris: Gallimard, 1965.

Sgard, Jean. "Deux siècles d'éditions de La nouvelle Héloïse," Les Cahiers de Varsovie 10 (1982): 123-34.

Spink, J. S. "The Social Background of Saint-Preux and d'Étange," French Studies 30 (1976): 153-69.

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NOTES

1. Volume 2 in Œuvres complètes, edited by Bernard Guyon and Henri Coulet, Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

2. This is also true of the Bordas school edition (1979).

3. "Au titre au lieu de moderne Héloïse, mettez nouvelle Héloïse," he wrote to his publisher Marc-Michel Rey on 18 January 1760 (RAL 928). All references to Rousseau's letters are to sequential numbers in the R. A. Leigh edition (abbreviated RAL) of the Correspondance complète.

4. See illustration p. 41 below, accompanying letter of circa 12 April 1759 (RAL 796).

5. "Je suis d'avis que le titre se partage et qu'il y en ait deux au lieu d'un. Le premier n'aura que ces mots. Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse. Première partie. Le second titre comprendra le reste. En un mot, il faut absolument trouver quelque expédient pour que le titre Simple ou double contienne tout ce que j'y ai mis, et pourtant qu'il ne soit pas confus" (Rousseau to Rey, 29 June 1760, RAL 1037). Rousseau refers explicitly to the first of these pages as a faux-titre (half-title): cf. his letter to Rey on 17 July 1760, RAL 1056.

6. "Le titre courant des pages ne doit point être Lettres de deux Amans &c. mais, La nouvelle Héloïse" (Rousseau to Rey, 6 March 1760, RAL 952).

7. Rousseau to Rey, 14 March 1759, RAL 788.

8. March 1761, p. 101; April 1761, I: 66-85 and II: 108-24.

9. 15 February 1761, 61-72; 1 March 1761, 38-54; 15 March 1761, 45-66.

10. The editions in question, following the Jo-Ann McEachern's denominations, are 17A-C, 18A-B, 19 and 20, all dated 1764.

11. "Cette froide et ridicule estampe . . . a été ajoutée à mon insu je ne sais par qui ni pourquoi" (quoted by Guyon in the Pléiade edition, 1824).

12. The first of these appears to be in 1775, McEachern 34B.

13. These editions, ranging in date from 1782 to 1792, are McEachern numbers 45A-D, 45G, 45I, 45K, 48, 52B, 53A-B, 54. The only discrete editions wanting a mention of Julie are 55A (1789) and 55B (1792).

14. In the nineteenth century there also appeared occasional editions with the "Héloïse" this title alone (1843, 1850, 1872, 1889). For an overview of the novel's publication history see Jean Sgard, "Deux siècles d'éditions de La nouvelle Héloïse."

15. Eloisa: Or, a Series of Original Letters Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau. Translated from the French (London: R. Griffiths, T. Becket, P. A. De Hondt, 1761), 4 vols.

16. Edinburgh: J. Bell, J. Dickson, C. Elliot, 1773, 3 vols.

17. Gustave Lanson, Nivelle de la Chaussée et la comédie larmoyante (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 158.

18. It may of course be arguable that the redundance of such a title, particularly in this last example, has a thematic rationale. Not infrequently, such duplications are an attempt to simulate the voice crying out a name repeatedly, as in Absalom, Absalom! (certainly Faulkner's title would never be thought void of semantic content) and the video play Tora! Tora! Tora!

19. For a list of these see the Mornet edition of Julie, 2: vii-viii.

20. Richardson's unknown one-name eponyms were more rhythmically trisyllabic: Pamela, Clarissa, Grandisson.

21. On cannot say categorically that he means specifically the name Héloïse, for Lettres de deux amants might alone be enough to qualify for the distinction of "titre assez décidé."

22. Lettres à M. de Voltaire sur La nouvelle Héloïse (ou Aloïsia). He particularly mocks, at the beginning of the second letter, the comparison of St. Preux's modest accomplishments with those of the great Abelard (399). The attribution to Voltaire is more than probable but not demonstrable: cf. Labrosse, 186.

23. This is clear from the parallel language of the second letter, which is a rewrite of Julie's plot in the style of Candide: of d'Étange's Vaudois nobility Voltaire quips: "Vous savez qu'il n'y a rien de plus grand que ces barons" (399); and later, when the protagonist goes to Paris, he writes that it is "de peur que M. le baron ne le fît jeter, en Suisse, par les fenêtres de sa chaumière, qu'il appelait château" (402).

24. Aloisiæ Sigeæ Toletanæ satyra sotadica was presented as a translation by Jean Meursius into Latin of the work of a Spanish poetess. A French translation bore the title Aloysia ou entretiens académiques des dames (1680) and another L'Académie des dames (1730). Voltaire refers to Rousseau's novel as La Nouvelle Aloisia in a letter to d'Alembert (20 April 1761, Correspondence no. 6585).

25. The hero, he writes, "s'avisa, étant ivre, de dire beaucoup d'ordures à sa respectable maîtresse" (397). Similarly, Grimm remarks on the passage where Julie cautions St. Preux against autoeroticism, "Ce dernier morceau serait plus à sa place dans l'Arétin, ainsi que quelques autres endroits du premier volume" (Correspondance Littéraire, 1 February 1761, in RAL A236, VIII:349): "l'Arétin" is an allusion to the Italian writer Aretino, or more exactly to pornographic works in circulation that were thought to be by him.

26. Brusselles and Paris: Antoine Boudet, 1775.

27. L'esprit de Julie ou extrait de la nouvelle Héloïse, ouvrage utile à la société et particulièrement à la jeunesse (Berlin). Cf. Anna Attridge, "The reception of la Nouvelle Héloïse," 246. Formey (1711-1797) also published an Anti-Émile in 1763.

28. Actually, though, one could say that his excerpts tend to depersonalize Julie by reducing personal characterizations to abstract truths: cf. Labrosse, 178-80.

29. Sabatier de Castres will use the odd permutation "Lettres de la nouvelle Héloïse" in Les trois siècles de la littérature française (3: 427).

30. Les liaisons dangereuses (1782), letters 10 and 33.

31. La paysane pervertie, 142.

32. L'émigré (1797), 2: 1566. Étiemble cites another use of Julie in a letter of 1789 by Mme Roland (1992).

33. Cf. Vie de Henri Brulard, 162, 163, 178.

34. Lanson for example frequently alludes to Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, even in his famous critical edition, as "Lettres anglaises," which was never an authentic title -- although thanks to him many readers probably think it is.

35. He still lists the title in exactly the same way in his revised new edition of the Manuel bibliographique de la littérature française moderne in 1921 (785), and as la Nouvelle Héloïse ou Lettres de deux amants in Histoire illustrée de la littérature française (Hachette, 1923, II.138).

36. This rendition of the title is not explained by Lanson's personal copy in the Duke University Library (t. 2 of Œuvres complètes, Paris: Lefèvre, 1839), which bears "Julie" in letters larger than the subtitle; a copy of the first edition also at Duke apparently did not come from the Lanson collection.

37. Pp. 1335-36, emphasis added. Noting that by this point (late 1759) an allusion can be found in one letter (a letter to, not by, Rousseau) to "la Nouvelle Aloyse,"(38)

38. From Orlando de Lorenzy, 6 November 1759, RAL 878. The same Lorenzy, however, later refers in two different letters to Julie (22 December 1760, RAL 1202; 28 January 1761, RAL 1241); Guyon did not know these letters, which were not in the earlier Correspondance Générale, but there is no reason to think they would have had any effect on his conclusions, since the correspondence furnishes many examples of the usage of Julie by other pens. " '     "

39. Of course on another, less lyrical level Guyon knows that it was only very late that Rousseau had "l'idée de compléter le titre de son roman" (p. 466, n. 2).

40. Fictions of feminine desire: disclosures of Heloise (98).

41. O.C., III.xcviii.

42. «Quinze années d'études rousseauistes», Dix-Huitième Siècle 24 (1992), 421-89.

43. Use of the article is a key sign: "la" Julie signifies that it is a nickname and not a title.

44. William Mead, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ou le romancier enchaîné.

45. Judith Still, Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau (259).

46. I have never seen an eighteenth-century edition that carried the name in hyphenated form (one finds other variants -- "St. Preux," "S. Preux" and even "Saint Preux"); the first in which I have seen it written this way is the Pierre et Firmin Didot (Paris) edition of 1814.

47. H. Gaston Hall, "The Concept of Virtue in La nouvelle Héloïse" (20).

48. For that matter, Rousseau never ever wrote his name Jean-Jacques but rather Jean Jacques.