Taste of Rousseau's "Julie; ou, la Nouvelle Héloïse"

“As long as we desire, we can do without happiness: we expect to achieve it. If happiness fails to come, hope persists, and the charm of illusion lasts as long as the passion that causes it. So this condition is sufficient in itself, and the anxiety it inflicts is a sort of enjoyment that compensates for reality… Woe to him who has nothing left to desire… We enjoy less what we obtain than what we hope for, and we are happy only before being happy."

I've only read Rousseau through an economic lens rather than a philosophical one so it is a little astonishing to know such a classic political theorist can compose such an amorous novel. I'm not sure too many people know about this piece by him and I could only read it online because a paperback copy of this edition on Amazon is $43. This fictitious epistolary novel follows a smoldering affair between Julie d'Etange and St. Preux but contains an enormous weight of subliminal philosophical thoughts; it reminds me a lot of Vita Brevis: A Letter to St. Augustine (another smoldering epistolary except it was a real-life exchange between Saint Augustine and his past lover). 

Enlightened epicureanism was huge in Rousseau's time and this was his contributional taste to it. He reveals that every attempt to overcome conflict is an illusion and the efforts subject his characters to painful irony. Julie's determination to die throughout the narrative reveals the dire cost of losing every sustaining illusion. In her final letter to St. Preux she writes, "Je me suis longtemps fait illusion. Cette illusion me fut salataire..." For Julie, death is a beautiful release from the victimizing claws of irony and a truly salutary illusion only lies beyond death, beyond the taste of experience.