Here he wrote La Nouvelle Heloise; here he indulged in the passion which that novel partly represents, his love for Madame d'Huodetot, sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay, a lady young and amiable, but plain, who had a husband and a lover (St Lambert), and whom Rousseau's devotion seems to have partly pleased and partly annoyed.
La Nouvelle Heloise appeared in the same year (1760), and it was immensely popular.
Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise, is a novel written in letters describing the loves of a man of low position and a girl of rank, her subsequent marriage to a respectable freethinker of her own station, the mental agonies of her lover, and the partial appeasing of the distresses of the lovers by the influence of noble sentiment and the good offices of a philanthropic Englishman.
The Contrat social was obviously anti-monarchic; the Nouvelle Heloise was said to be immoral; the sentimental deism of the "Profession du vicaire Savoyard" in Emile irritated equally the philosophe party and the church.
Rousseau is supposed to have drawn his portrait in the virtuous atheist Wolmar of the Nouvelle Heloise.
