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her mother's death, Manon passed a fortnight in a very precarious state between convulsive fits and hours of mute prostration, unrelieved by tears. To divert her thoughts from constantly brooding on her loss, an Abbé, who sometimes came to see her, bethought him of lending her the Nouvelle Héloïse. This book was an era in Madame Roland's life. If Plutarch had inspired her with a love of republican institutions, the Nouvelle Héloïse showed her the ideal of domestic life, and she now eagerly read and re-read Rousseau's works: he became her breviary. Like other devout worshippers of this oracle of the eighteenth century, she burned to tender her homage to The Master, as Boswell and as Gibbon and hundreds of others had done, amongst whom the redoubtable Robespierre is said to have been one. Chance seemed to favour Manon's wishes, for amongst her acquaintances there happened to be a Swiss gentleman, to whom, as was her habit with friends, she had given a nickname, labelling him the "Philosophical Republican." This abstraction of a man—human enough, however, to be presently much in love with the fair Manon—was sufficiently obliging to make over to her a