This collection of six letters also said “Letters with Sophie” written into 1757/58 to Sophie d' Houdetot with which Jean-Jacques Rousseau is in love, and who inspired the character of Julie in the Héloïse News, joins again with the kind parenetic (councils of wisdom). It is a question of improving this” happy naturalness “of Sophie.

The collection has also as a function to sublimate the love of Rousseau, to transform it into friendship. Their talks on the virtue should channel energy in love fills with enthusiasm some for the virtue. Because it is well towards the feeling that set out these letters, but towards the moral feeling.

After is one moment skeptical (“the object of the human life the happiness of the man, but who knows us how does one reach that point? ”), Rousseau launches a tirade on the impotent man and ignoramus. The books anything learned us; the true size of the man lies in the interior feeling of what is right and unjust. “If we are small by our lights, we are tall by our feelings”, i.e. our moral feelings. It is thus necessary to draw from oneself the first goods, to know to be happy in loneliness by listening to this interior voice, to build its happiness on satisfactions which this moral feeling can bring.

These letters put in light, but by a more intimate way, the central theme of the Profession of faith: “conscience, divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice”. They are regarded sometimes as an outline of this famous text.

First edition: Streckeisen- Moultou, Works and correspondence new of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paris, 1861 (letters 2,3,4); Verhandlungen DER neununddreissigsten Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner in Zurich, Leipzig, 1888 (letters 1,5,6).