In the fourth part of La Nouvelle Héloïse, at the invitation of M. de Wolmar, whose happy and fulfilled wife Julie is now, Saint-Preux travels to Clarens, where the de Wolmar family lives. This invitation constitutes the central pivot of the novel, from which it will be a question of reinventing Julie's love, neither outside the marriage that has been imposed on her, nor against it, but with it. Clarens is the opening device of this project.

The Clarens estate is administered in an original way that distinguishes it from the old family estate in Vevey, where Baron d'Étange still lives. Saint-Preux wrote an admiring letter to Milord Edouard describing this organization. He evokes "a simple and well-regulated house" and intends, through this letter X, "to give an idea of it by the detail of a domestic economy which announces the felicity of the masters of the house and makes it shared by those who inhabit it" (IV, 10, 527).

Domestic economy: this term is not dropped at random. It refers to the only political article Rousseau wrote for the Encyclopédie.

The Economy article in the Encyclopédie

Political economy is now an academic discipline in its own right. The term barely existed when, in Volume V of the Encyclopédie in November 1755, a few months after the diffusion in France of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau's article Economy appeared, which in 1758 became the Discourse on Political Economy. It is not known whether Rousseau wrote it spontaneously or whether Diderot had commissioned him to do so. What is certain is that as early as his stay in Venice in 1744 Rousseau had begun work on a book project, the Institutions politiques, a project he would eventually abandon for Le Contrat social, published in 1762 just after La Nouvelle Héloïse.

Working with difference

The starting point of the article is based on a distinction:

"ECONOMY or ECONOMY, (Morale & Politics.) this word comes from οἶκος, house, & from νόμος, law, & originally means only the wise & lawful government of the house, for the common good of the whole family. The meaning of this term was subsequently extended to the government of the large family, which is the state. To distinguish these two meanings, in the latter case it is called general or political economy, and in the other, domestic or particular economy. This article deals only with the former. On domestic economy, see Pere de famille¹."

There is a domestic economy, in the private space of the home, and a political economy, in the public space of state government. But the notion of economy is not exactly divided into two equal, nor antagonistic, subcategories; rather, it is an extrapolation ("the meaning of this term was in the sequel extended...") that is made of the first, the domestic, which serves as a model for the second, elaborated in a second stage from it. Indeed, the etymology brings eco-nomy back to the administration, νόμος, of the house, οἶκος, so that the expression "domestic economy" constitutes a redundancy, domestic repeating in Latin (domus) what economy already said in Greek.

However, between the first and second economies, Rousseau postulates "an extreme difference":

"they differ too much in grandeur to be administered in the same way, & there will always be an extreme difference between domestic government, where the father can see everything for himself, & civil government, where the ruler sees almost nothing except through the eyes of others."

The political economy is a blind economy: the immediacy of the sovereign father's sensible presence is contrasted with the administration of the state by a ruler who "sees almost nothing". Two opposing semiotics: the domestic stage, whose theater is always visible, is contrasted with the dark room of political power, which administers without seeing. There are no two principles of government: seeing is the principial, natural means of governing, which the political economy cannot implement directly, and for which it will have to make up the shortfall with "the eyes of others". The eyes are therefore the model, starting with the prohibition that withdraws the ruler from view in political economy: the impossibility of seeing is indeed surreptitiously reversed into the prohibition of being seen, when Rousseau moves from the "ruler [who] sees almost nothing" to "rulers [who] have no similar rule", and can disobey the rules they enact for others.

The work of difference continues in the following paragraphs: laws in the public space supplement the father's physical strength in the domestic space. Domestic administration tends to increase the father's properties; the public to conserve "the particular property which is anterior to it": this is neither another property, nor anything other than property; there is no other model than particular property, which constitutes the original foundation of the political (without possible juridical anteriority, therefore) from an anterior state (which must nevertheless be legally assumed). It's always a shaky apparatus², in which the proclaimed difference amounts to a supplanted similarity, and extended in such a way as to constitute the model from a prohibition: it becomes dangerous to increase property in the political economy, even though the notion of property is founded on "the particular property that is prior to it", and rests, in turn, on increase with a view to division among children. Growth is outlawed at the very moment when property, which is based on growth, is set up as a model; property, which founds the public economy, is posited as its original principle; but its model is particular property, which is prior to it according to an unthinkable anteriority.

Also in the same spirit, the ruler's power differs from the patria potestas in the private space, but without introducing any conceptual otherness whatsoever. The absolute power of the chief is built on the model of the absolute power of the father, who takes precedence over the mother, children and servants. Rousseau begins, however, by asserting a radical difference:

"There is nothing of the sort in political society. Far from the ruler having a natural interest in the happiness of individuals, it is not uncommon for him to seek his own in their misery." (p. 43)

But what does "none of the above" mean? Is it really the triple precedence over mother, children and servants mentioned above? Rousseau does evoke those cases where "it is often a child who commands men"... But the principle, the model of command remains paternal, it is indeed an artifact of fatherhood that is assumed to head the political economy, and can only be castigated as an artifact precisely because the model has not changed.

This in fact designates something else, which is stated in the sentence immediately following. This is in fact the "natural interest in the happiness of individuals", i.e. the father's love for his children, whereas the chief "has no reason to love you". But the father's love is formulated as natural interest, so that the ruler's political interest, which may go so far as to profit from the people's misery, is not strictly speaking a different principle, but an artifact of the father's love, a perverse extension.

There's more. The magistrate in the public arena must not listen to "the voice of nature", i.e. his natural interest as a father for his children; in other words, he must not put the interest of his family before that of the state: the voice of nature "is for the magistrate only a false guide" and it requires, not to be influenced by it, "the most sublime virtue". The public interest is built on the model of the natural interest, but first by striking the latter as forbidden.

The general will

Finally comes a final distinction, of a different nature since it no longer opposes the domestic to the public but, within the public space, government and sovereignty:

"I beg my readers to distinguish again the public economy of which I have to speak, & which I call government, from the supreme authority which I call sovereignty; distinction which consists in the fact that the one has the legislative right, & obliges in certain cases the very body of the nation, while the other has only the executive power, & can only oblige individuals. See Politics & Sovereignty." (p. 45)

By distinguishing between government and sovereignty, executive power ("executory power") and legislative right, Rousseau is undoubtedly echoing here, in his own way, the theory of the separation of powers that Montesquieu had developed in Book XI of L'Esprit des lois (1748), drawing on the "constitution of England" and Locke's modeling of it in his Traitement du gouvernement civil (1690). Montesquieu's primary concern was to prevent the abuse of power: "For power not to be abused, it is necessary that, by the disposition of things, power should stop power" (XI, 4, 167³). All power must not be concentrated in the hands of a single person, or even a single council or political body. The constitution will therefore distinguish between different types of power, it will separate heterogeneous territories for the exercise of power: "There are three kinds of power in every state: legislative power, the power to execute those things which depend on the law of nations, and the power to execute those things which depend on civil law." (XI, 6, 168)

Rousseau's concern and reasoning are quite different. Rousseau does not distinguish between different powers; there is only one power, which emanates from sovereignty and is exercised in government. Government, i.e. the political economy that interests him here, is an extension of sovereignty, just as the body politic is an extension of the body of private individuals, a change of scale inducing, ultimately, a cascade of differences. Ideally, then, political economy is an expression of the sovereignty of the body politic. This expression of sovereignty, Rousseau designates as "general will":

"The body politic is therefore also a moral being which has a will; & this general will, which tends always to the conservation & well-being of the whole & of each part, & which is the source of laws, is for all the members of the state in relation to them & to it, the rule of just & unjust." (ibid.)

The general will is the guiding notion of the Economy article and arguably Rousseau's most important theoretical invention in the political realm. There is obviously a difference between real political economy and the general will, for a whole series of reasons that Rousseau enumerates in the article. But the essential point is that, with the general will, Rousseau establishes a criterion, a point of reference from which to operate the critique of political economy, itself understood as the work of difference, between domestic economy and political economy, between sovereignty and government. Through this critique, the work of difference can become discourse. The politicization of discourse involves the confrontation of its economy with the general will.

Theoretically, ideally, the general will presides over the establishment of laws, through which sovereignty is exercised; then the application of laws constitutes government, or the political economy. But Rousseau also assumes a direct relationship between political economy and "the general will, source and supplement of all laws": whenever the administration of public affairs is not absolutely specified by a law, good government consists in supplementing the general will, in choosing "the party most favorable to the public interest". This is where true political action is exercised.

In practice, the effectiveness of the law in itself is weak: when the law is enacted against the general will, and applied by compulsion, without intimate persuasion of the citizens, the "order and peace" it establishes are vain: "it is much that the state is tranquil & the law respected but if nothing more is done, there will be in all this more appearance than reality, & the government will hardly be obeyed if it limits itself to obedience." And further on, "the greatest spring of public authority lies in the hearts of citizens."

This is the decisive consequence of a theory of politics based on the general will. Sovereignty is not represented by law; it is expressed by the general will. Here we find the epistemological leap that, at the beginning of the Essai sur l'origine des langues, enables Rousseau to define language not as a system for representing things (a semiotic), but as a movement for expressing feelings (a language of poetic accent). Like the language of accent, the general will emanates from hearts and is imprinted on them; it is communicated far more than it is voted or explained:

"It is not enough to say to citizens, be good; they must be taught to be so; & example itself, which in this respect is the first lesson, is not the only means that must be employed: love of country is the most effective; for as I have already said, every man is virtuous when his particular will conforms in everything to the general will, & we willingly want what the people we love want." (p. 55)

Of course, this can be understood as a program, as the injunction to educate the people and the intention to reform educational methods⁴. Undeniably, this was a hot topic at the time, and Rousseau took a close interest in it, in La Nouvelle Héloïse about Claire and Julie's children, then in the Émile. But above all here it's about theorizing the general will, much more than manipulating it. The general will is the natural expression of the general interest, which therefore pre-exists the political institution, and at the same time the general will is the product of an education by example and by the ideological communication of love of country: it is therefore a political construction. Contradictorily originary and constructed, the general will is literally unthinkable. It is the problematic conceptual node, the blind spot from which the discourse unfolds, Rousseau's work as a single discourse, the system of Rousseau's thought.

It's not enough to say, we must learn to be: discourse is a critique of language in the name of presence. This critique is carried out by setting up a social device for communicating the general will. It is taught by example, propagated and collectivized as love of country, through which it begins to exist in its own right. But where is this example to be found in the first place, if not in the domestic economy, from which the political economy has been carefully distinguished? There is a conceptually ambivalent implementation here, of which the episode, or experience of Clarens constitutes, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, the fictionalized program.

The Government of Clarens

Clarens is a device. Saint-Preux describes it first as a place, by difference from another place, before deducing from the disposition of places the administration of things, then the government of people.

"Since the masters of this house fixed their dwelling there, they have put to their use all that served only for ornament; it is no longer a house fate to be seen, but to be inhabited. [...] They have replaced rich, old furniture with simple, comfortable ones. [...] Everywhere, the useful has been substituted for the pleasant, and the pleasant has almost always won." (IV, 10, 528)

Opposed to the former residence of Étange, a "magnificent and grand château", is the house of Clarens, with "all the apparatus of rustic economy". In Clarens, everything converges on the useful. Château d'Étange was a figure of sovereignty, incarting the noble majesty of paternal power, the old world of aristocratic hierarchies, with its gilding and ornaments. The house of Clarens is a place of government, fitted out for the administration of property, with convenient furnishings enabling efficient management. Étange is placed under the aegis of paternal authority, which enacts its laws; Clarens is a community, a collective body whose thought experiment allows Rousseau to test, through fiction, his theory of the general will.

This economy, in the sense of the classical language (this government, this administration, this management), aims at efficiency: it is therefore also an economy in the contemporary sense of the term⁵, whose production is governed according to a logic of profitability and efficiency:

"M. de Wolmar claims that the earth produces in proportion to the number of arms that cultivate it; better cultivated, it yields more; this superabundance of production provides enough to cultivate it even better; the more men and livestock we put on it, the more surplus it provides for their upkeep. There is no end in sight to this continual and reciprocal increase in produce and cultivators. On the contrary, neglected land loses its fertility: the fewer people a country produces, the less food it yields: it is the lack of inhabitants that prevents it from feeding the few it has, and in any region that becomes depopulated one must sooner or later die of hunger." (IV, 10, 529)

What a far cry from the talk of degrowth or populist Malthusianism that has invaded contemporary politics! First of all, we are struck by the insistence on production: "the earth produces", "this superabundance of production", "this continual and reciprocal increase in production", "the less a country produces..., the less it produces", that's five occurrences in just under ten lines! The economy of Clarens is entirely oriented towards intensive production, towards the maximum yield from a plot of land which, because it is small, must accommodate the maximum amount of labor to produce the maximum amount of surplus value. From the Château d'Étange to the Clarens estate, we have moved from a feudal logic of pomp to a capitalist logic of yield, whose political principle is economics.

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The refoundation of politics by economics is based on domestic space⁶: Clarens is a private space, closed in on itself and limiting exchanges with the outside world as much as possible, through self-sufficiency in food and the establishment of leisure activities that discourage the estate's servants and workers from spending their free time in the outside world. This enclosure⁷, which enables Rousseau to virtualize in thought a field of economic experimentation, to make Clarens a thought experiment, gives the estate the status of utopia and thereby, paradoxically, politicizes it: Clarens's domestic economy fictionalizes the political economy of the Encyclopédie and prepares the latter's deployment as a discourse, bearing criticism on the very model it deploys.

Construction of political authority and falsification of the general will

Very quickly, on reading letter X, we understand that the object of the discourse is government, that this letter is a discourse on the government of Clarens, on the strategy implemented by the Wolmar couple to govern. In this sense, although the economy in question is apparently domestic, it is indeed political economy in the sense of the article Economy in the Encyclopédie.

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The whole point is to demonstrate that we govern effectively neither by law, nor by coercion, nor even by interest. The most powerful spring of government is love: it is from love that the general will is born, on which political authority can and must rely, just as it is in love that it is resolved. Again and again, love forms the basis of the master's discourse, bent on serving the Lady:

"However, an even more effective means, the only one that economic views do not make us think of, and which is more appropriate to Mad^e de Wolmar, is to win the affection of these good people by granting them hers. She doesn't believe she can repay with money the trouble people take for her, and thinks she owes favors to anyone who has done her any. Workers, servants, all those who have served her, even if only for a single day, become her children; she takes part in their pleasures, their sorrows, their fate; she inquires into their affairs, their interests are her own; she takes on a thousand cares for them, she gives them advice, she accommodates their disputes, and does not show the affability of her character by empty and ineffective words, but by genuine services and continuous acts of kindness. They, for their part, leave everything at her slightest sign; they fly when she speaks; her single glance animates their zeal, in her presence they are happy; in her absence they speak of her and are animated to serve her. Her charms and her words do much; her gentleness and her virtues do more. Ah, Milord, what an adorable and powerful empire is that of beneficent beauty!" (IV, 10, 531)

There is no question here of production, but of service, and a service that starts from the lady and returns to her from not workers who are paid, servants who are exploited, but a court of servant knights, placing themselves voluntarily, gratuitously under "the adorable and powerful empire [...] of beneficent beauty". The description of bourgeois paternalism recycles the vocabulary and manners of a collectivized and somehow democratized courtly service, or at least dressed in a democratic façade.

The exchange of services comes in addition to work and the wages that pay for it. In the production system set up on the estate, this exchange is both a supplement and the foundation of the political authority that organizes Clarens into a political society. Service comes after the establishment of production relationships, and in a way erases, or makes us forget, the mercantile structure and brutal hierarchy between masters and their employees. Symbolically, morally, service bans the structure. Better still, it informs production itself, which becomes service to the Lady in return, in gratitude for the thousand little services Mme de Wolmar has rendered her people. The model of production is service, which forbids what production models: relations of production, class difference, domination and subjection through work and money.

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The erasure of the model by the very process of modeling constructs political authority from a family artifact, which naturalizes the power exercised as patria potestas. Julie's people "all become her children"; "They are not looked upon merely as mercenaries from whom only exact service is demanded; but as members of the family, whose wrong choice is capable of desolating it⁸." (p. 532)

The formula of-the-family-given-the-wrong-choice says it all: precisely, one does not choose one's family; this family is not one because someone chose it, composed it. On the other hand, the Economy article had insisted on the fundamental structure of the natural family, which is a patriarchal structure, where the father must always take precedence over the mother. Not so in Clarens, where, while M. De Wolmar initiated the laws, Julie is still the ultimate governing body.

"Am I wrong, Milord, to compare such cherished masters to fathers and their servants to children?", Saint-Preux asks later: his speech bears the criticism of this comparison.

Here we touch on the central question of the interpretation of Saint-Preux's speech. He presents his description of Clarens as eulogy and makes no secret of his enthusiasm at the start of the letter. Yet he decries Julie's art of governing as an art of deception, in which benevolence is Machiavellianly calculated:

"In the Republic, citizens are restrained by morals, principles, virtue: but how to restrain servants, mercenaries, other than by constraint and embarrassment? The master's whole art is to hide this discomfort under the veil of pleasure or interest, so that they think they want whatever they are forced to do." (p. 542)

A few pages earlier, we saw, Saint-Preux was extolling an economy of service. Here, he reminds us that servants are first and foremost mercenaries, served for the money they earn, not for the pleasure they might derive from it. The mainspring of service is discomfort, the meaning of which in classical language is worth recalling:

"Embarrassment. Some write Gehenne. s. f. Question, torture, torments that one makes a criminal suffer to make him tell the truth. [...] This word is getting old in this sense. [...]
☞ Gêne is said by extension of anything you make someone suffer, to make them do or say something. The Soldiers put the Peasants to gêne, to make them confess where their money is.
☞ This term is often used in a figurative sense to express sorrow of mind, a painful effort. [...] Se donner la gêne, mettre son esprit à la gêne, c'est se tourmenter beaucoup, faire de grands efforts d'esprit." (Dictionnaire de Trévoux, ed. 1771, IV, 456b)

By gêne, Rousseau brings work back to its etymological meaning of torture, violence exerted to get things done. Discomfort is the torturous reality of work. The aim is to hide this discomfort by giving the Clarens employees the impression that they're not working, that it's out of pleasure and interest that they're doing what they're doing: yet this interest is not mercenary, not pecuniary; it's the interest they take in Julie, through the bond of exchange of services she's woven with them, which gives them the illusion of being one family.

The asserted opposition between the social relations in the Republic (which enable the political economy to function) and the administration of Clarens (which is a domestic economy) must not delude us: we have seen how Rousseau proceeds in the Economy article of the Encyclopédie. The difference always conceals an extension, an extrapolation (here, from private to public space, from particular to general interests), which covers up a similarity. What differs is not "morals, principles, virtue", but the artifice that promotes them: the aim is "that they think will everything they are obliged to do"; it's a matter of forging a will, what we see here at work is the ideological manufacture of the general will.

In Économie, Rousseau had suggested that the falsification of the general will was a common practice:

"...the most general will is also always the most just, & [...] the voice of the people is indeed the voice of God.
It does not follow, therefore, that public deliberations are always fair; [...] it is not impossible [...] that the council of a democracy may pass bad decrees & condemn the innocent: but this will never happen, unless the people are seduced by particular interests, which with credit & eloquence a few clever men will be able to substitute for their own. Then public deliberation will be something else, & the general will something else."

Mr. and Mme de Wolmar's employees believe they want what is in the interest of the community of Clarens when in fact they are serving the particular interests of their masters. The will they express is thus a falsified general will, even if Julie's virtue strives to ensure that her interests as a company director coincide as closely as possible with those of the family artifact she and her people have created. This falsification is not necessarily perverse, nor is it at all so from Saint-Preux's point of view, who defends the idea of the servants' well-understood interests, fooled for their own good. That is to say, in the end, this particular interest (of Julie), which differs from the general will (of the people of Clarens), supplements it in a way that is never openly condemned by Saint-Preux, just as this domestic economy (fictionalized by the Clarens estate), which differs from the political economy (of the Republic), supplements it and deploys its discourse, without however fully assuming its properly political implication.

The simulacrum of equality

Coexisting in letter X, then, is the clear-cut, unapologetic description of a fraud, and even a series of frauds by Julie, and the exaltation of her virtue, to the delight of the family community she has built around her.

Fraud is inherent in the very way Julie exercises political authority in Clarens. I speak of political authority, not domestic, because the family in which it is exercised is a forged, extrapolated family, a family artifact, which exactly defines the body politic by difference from the natural family. Moreover, authority is not, strictly speaking, exercised, but concealed and supplanted by example:

"Jacks imitate masters; and, crudely imitating them, they make sensitive in their conduct the faults that the veneer of education better conceals in others. [...] In everything the example of masters is stronger than their authority, and it is not natural that their servants should want to be more honest people than they are." (p. 553)

The example of masters is stronger than their authority, i.e. there are two forms of authority, a political authority, or one modelled on the political, which is what Rousseau names authority here, and an economic authority, properly domestic, which he designates here as an example. Economic authority is exercised by the contagion of example, by the dissemination throughout the community of a way of life exemplified by the masters, in contrast to properly political authority, which is exercised by the law, by the constraint exerted by the law on the governed, by providing for sanctions, punishments and fines in the event of infringement. In the absence of a law that sets the rules of life, economic authority supplements a model that irradiates, i.e. the sensitive communication of this model.

But in the domestic setting that interests us here, there is no law in the legal sense of the term. What takes the place of law in this space that escapes politics but mimes it, apes it, is the discourse of the masters. The master's authority manifests itself in the discourse he holds. And here the relationship between the essential and the supplementary is reversed: it is no longer example that supplants authority, but rather "the veneer of education" which, artificially, supplants the lack of example. This varnish refers to the teacher's discourse, a pure rhetorical parade, a pure ornament divorced from the practices of life and the example they set. For the masters, this varnish makes their conduct acceptable, even justifies it, or pretends to justify it; for the valets, devoid of varnish, inaccessible to the artifact of discourse, the model manifests itself in its unbearable abjection and perverse corrupting efficacy.

Rousseau does not attempt to rehabilitate, in Clarens, a discourse of the master that would express political authority. The master's discourse is forbidden here, and Julie and M. de Wolmar exercise their sovereignty only on condition that they do not hold the discourse of authority.

Rousseau does not attempt to rehabilitate, at Clarens, a master's discourse that would express political authority.

The world of Clarens is the place and means of this reversal, this critique of discourse and its overcoming. This is expressed in Saint-Preux's chiasmus formula:

The world of Clarens is the place and means of this reversal, this critique of discourse and its overcoming.

"Isn't it quite simple that children of the same father treat each other as brothers? This is what we are told every day at the Temple without being made to feel it; this is what the inhabitants of this house feel without being told." (p. 552)

The Pauline discourse, which preaches the equality of men before God, is only a discourse that is belied by the reality of a fundamentally unequal society: this is why what is preached in the Temple has no sensible echo in us and remains empty talk; on the other hand, this equality is felt by the community of Clarens and, because the masters set the example, they don't need to hold the discourse. But how can one set an example of equality when one is the master, especially if that example is intended to establish and perpetuate the authority of the masters?

This is because it's not really a question here of equality or justice, but of effectiveness in the exercise of authority: the economic, domestic authority of example is more effective than the authority of discourse, of law, of politics. It also marks a change of regime: the ancien régime is vertical, structured by the radical difference between lords and servants, between those who hold the veneer of discourse and those who lack it. In this ancien régime, discourse reigns, and the rhetorical articulations of the masters' eloquence are the mirror and justification of orders and places in society. This is what Jacques Rancière defines as the poetic regime.

The new regime, on the contrary, is horizontal, founded on the community formed by masters with their servants, in the manner of a family. In this new regime, discourse is forbidden, and the prohibition of discourse becomes the model: it is the very fact that the masters forbid themselves discourse that sets them up as models through the sensitive example of their lives, that gives confidence in this example, that allows this example to be communicated and become contagious. This new regime is by no means egalitarian: but its inequality derives its legitimacy from the fact that it is regularly denied by the example of the masters, and is constantly reaffirmed by the servants themselves renewing their trust in, and devotion to, their masters. In other words, discourse is no longer the mainspring of this regime, but sensibility, which becomes the model's fundamental vector of communication. Because the spring of the new regime is sensibility, Jacques Rancière defines it as an aesthetic regime⁹.

Discourse as critique

Rousseau for all that by no means renounces discourse: but at Clarens, it's not the masters who hold it, it's Saint-Preux describing their domestic economy. The speech is epidictic: but the very praise itself already introduces a critical dimension. When discourse ceases to be performative (the master's discourse, which by the mere fact of enunciating itself refounded the hierarchy legitimizing the master as master), when discourse dissociates itself from its object to consider it at a distance from itself, the first form of critical distancing is praise.

Here we touch on the essential issue at stake in this letter X of Part Four, in the grand project of discourse development that structures and innervates the whole of La Nouvelle Héloïse. Through Clarens' domestic economy and its description, a critical relationship is set in motion. It is never fully played out or assumed: it remains undecidable whether Saint-Preux is a stakeholder in the community or an outside observer describing it.

In letter X, Julie suddenly takes over from Saint-Preux, who is no longer the first person to speak: "I said it to Julie; and this is more or less what she answered me. Pure morality..." (p. 545); then "Encore une coup," continued Mad.e de Wolmar in a quieter tone, "ce n'est pas dans les assemblées nombreuses..." (p. 547); then "Voilà, Milord, ce que me dit Julie au sujet de la danse..." (p. 548). In principle, after this sentence, it is Saint-Preux who takes the floor on his own account. Yet how are we to understand the "nous" in "c'est ce qu'on nous dit tous les jours au Temple sans nous le sentir" and the "cette" in "c'est ce que les habitants de cette maison sentent", where "cette" can hardly be read as anything other than a Latinism for notre (hæc domus). Saint-Preux clearly includes himself in the nous, but no doubt also in the cette, and can hardly put cette maison at a distance after invoking ce qu'on nous dit.

Saint-Preux's discourse is shifting towards a critical one, but he begins by making up for Julie's lack of discourse, whose authority is now based on the prohibition of discourse. It will take two more parts for this critical distancing to take full effect, for Saint-Preux to say no to Julie by refusing to marry Claire, and by this refusal to precipitate the collapse of the model here described.

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Notes