How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore

that Day’s influence on him was crucial. Meeting Day marked the beginning of “a new era in my life.” Strangely, perhaps, Mrs. Edgeworth did not share her husband’s enthusiasm for his new friend. Although she apparently felt no unease at her husband’s friendship with the gambling, drinking, lewd Delaval, she took an immediate and fervent dislike to Day. Edgeworth was bewildered. “A more dangerous and seductive companion than the one, or a more moral and improving companion than the other, could not be found in England,” he protested. Yet perhaps Mrs. Edgeworth had more of an instinct for danger and immorality than her trusting husband.
    The timing of their meeting was critical: it was the beginning of a new era for Day too. For in between his scientific endeavors and his legal studies, Edgeworth had become enthralled by a radically different approach to education, which he was eager to share with his latest friend. It was this experimental new system that would furnish Day with the tool he needed to solve his search for love.
    Although Edgeworth’s marriage was far from perfect, he was about to provide the final piece of the puzzle to help Day create his perfect wife.

THREE
    SOPHIE
       Staffordshire, summer 1766   
    E njoying a stroll in the gardens of Wootton Hall, a friend’s country house in Staffordshire, Erasmus Darwin stopped outside the entrance to a grotto. With a casual air, which belied his corpulence, the physician stooped down to examine a small flower. Since he had already added botany to the long list of his interests, there was nothing obviously remarkable in Darwin’s scrutiny. In fact, however, his seemingly spontaneous action was a carefully contrived ploy. By halting outside the grotto, Darwin was determined to coax out its shy and fearful inhabitant. The trick worked. For out of the gloom loped a thin, frail figure with beady, black eyes. It was the international fugitive Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
    Ever since the philosopher had published his controversial views on liberty and education in 1762, Rousseau had been hounded across Europe. Church authorities in his adopted country of France had banned both The Social Contract, with its daring views on freedom and equality, and Émile, with its progressive ideas on education. Forced to flee France, Rousseau headed for his homeland only to discover that his native city of Geneva had followed suit by publicly burning both books. He spent the next three years lying low in the Swiss mountains until villagers stoned his cottage and Rousseau was on the run again. Finding himself with nowhere left to hide, the fifty-three-year-old exile had reluctantly accepted safe passageto England. Under the protection of David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, who was serving as secretary of the British Embassy in Paris, Rousseau had crossed the Channel.
    Arriving in London in January 1766, Rousseau had been fêted by the press and mobbed in the streets. “All the world are eager to see this man, who by his singularity, has drawn himself into much trouble,” announced the Public Advertiser. Dressed in the colorful Armenian costume he had recently adopted, “the celebrated John James Rousseau”—as he was dubbed by the English newspapers—was deluged by admirers including the Prince of Wales. Such celebrity status did nothing, however, to improve Rousseau’s temper.
    Notoriously cantankerous and neurotic, Europe’s most wanted philosopher detested fame almost as much as he hated obscurity. Rousseau had no love of England or the English, and he longed for his companion Thérèse Levasseur until she was escorted across the Channel a month later by James Boswell, a keen admirer of Rousseau’s work. Inevitably, Boswell being Boswell, the job of chaperone entailed several steamy nights of passion en route. Reunited with his lover, Rousseau accepted the offer of a quiet retreat at Wootton Hall, the country home of another admirer, Richard Davenport. But the charms