Of the powers of colour in La Nouvelle Héloïse

Résumé 0

At first sight, La Nouvelle Héloïse is an outstanding illustration of the overall paucity of colours in the Enlightenment novel which most often does not actually reflect the new importance then conferred upon colour at the time. Reading La Nouvelle Héloïse through the prism of colour is all the more paradoxical as the novel was likely to have been composed at almost the same time as Rousseau’s anti-colourist pages in the Essai sur l’origine des langues. Should one simply see Julie as a ‘Puritan condemnation of colour’ in the words of Bernadette Fort? In fact, neither does Rousseau take issue with colour for masking reality, nor does he stigmatize colour for appealing artificially to the senses. Taking into account the illustrations as well as a careful re-reading of many of the letters, this study of the novel highlights what turns out to be an aesthetic of chromatic suggestiveness.