Les conversations d'Émilie by Epinay
"Les conversations d'Émilie" by Epinay is a didactic educational dialogue written in the late 18th century. It presents a mother guiding her young daughter through moral, social, and practical lessons using everyday talk, brief stories, and gentle correction. The focus is on forming character—obedience, gratitude, compassion, modesty, and self-control—while introducing simple ideas about nature and society. The central figures are the attentive mother and the curious child, Émilie. The beginning of this
work opens with a prefatory letter declaring that it is not a full education system but a set of conversations for the earliest years, meant to fill idle moments with useful instruction. The first dialogues show Émilie’s distractions and questions leading to lessons on what makes humans “reasonable,” living in society, happiness through duty, and the need for prompt obedience; the mother also makes Émilie feel her dependence on others and the value of gratitude, then contrasts good and bad conduct with an anecdote about a girl who ruins her prospects. Subsequent talks teach kindness to animals (contrasting Domitian’s cruelty with Titus’s goodness), acceptance of small discomforts, how to help one’s nurse and the poor, and the basics of plants as “vegetals.” When Émilie confesses wasting time, the mother has her make it up by study, and a moral tale about Pauline and the recalcitrant Mlle d’Orville shows that repentance and effort can improve character, though lost time can’t be fully recovered. Finally, a playful but precise correction of “parrot learning” (the four elements and the three “kingdoms”) leads to a simple experiment and vocabulary lesson, plus guidance on modesty and self-respect as the true guard of a young girl’s behavior. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Epinay, Louise Florence Pétronille Tardieu d'Esclavelles, marquise d', 1726-1783 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 09002819 |
| Title | Les conversations d'Émilie |
| Edition | Nouvelle édition. |
| Original Publication | Paris: Pissot, 1776. |
| Credits | Laurent Vogel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica)) |
| Language | French |
| LoC Class | PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese |
| Subject | Young women -- Conduct of life -- Early works to 1800 |
| Subject | Moral education -- Early works to 1800 |
| Subject | Young women -- Education -- Early works to 1800 |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77364 |
| Release Date | Nov 29, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 194 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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