#still i bet he tries to get himself a copy as a teen/young adult

[edgysaintjust]

So we can assume Maxine owned JJ's teen romance novel?? What year was it written??

New Heloise was written in the 1760s and in theory it's obviously possible that he had this book. I do not think we have a reliable and full list of his personal belongings and library, or even a mention of it by a guest at his place (we only seem to have courtois, who was skipping or adding a lot of details according to his own will), but even if we had there is a possibility he owned it earlier in his life (before living with the Duplays) but we simply do not know.

As reported by Thompson in his bio of Robespierre;

An inventory made in 1794 mentions certain periodicals which he received as a member of the Convention; correspondence with foreign powers, ministers, and the Committee of Public Safety; official papers on the foreign trade of the Republic; several French, English, and Italian grammars; half a dozen dry-titled law-books; and some works on morals and history, such as Mably, Guicciardini, Fleury, and Fenelon. Philosophy is represented by de la Rochefoucauld, Francis Bacon, and Pope’s Essay on Man. Lastly there are some pamphlets, including Les crimes des reines de France, and a number of treatises on mathematical subjects.

No Rousseau, but we also know that ‘a volume of Rousseau or of Racine was generally open on his table’, as reported by Lamartine. I couldn’t personally navigate through the report on his personal belongings, but it’s obviously strange if Rousseau wasn’t mentioned here, and I would strongly doubt a volume or two didn't find a place in his modest book collection. And I mean, Robespierre *read* Rousseau (a shocking discovery, I know!), even for the Duplays during their family evenings, according to far more reliable Elisabeth Le Bas. She never specified which works exactly were present, so we cannot tell if Heloise was read there or not, but at least we can be sure of the author.

In the evening, after returning from the walk, Robespierre read us the works of Corneille, Voltaire, Rousseau; we listened to him as a family with great pleasure; he knew so well how to make what he was reading felt! After an hour or two of reading, he retired to his room, saying good evening to all. He had a profound respect for my father and mother; they too regarded him as a son, and we as a brother.

 Abbé Proyart, Robespierre’s former teacher who left us a bitter portrait of him from Louis-le-Grand claims that he had caught Robespierre reading so-called 'evil books' during his final year at college, and we know the school was cautious about the readings of New Heloise, but the book Robespierre was reading at the time was never specified. We do not know if it was Rousseau at all, but surely it must have been politically controversial, assuming we can trust Proyart with this little fun fact. Still, even if he did not own a copy of Julie, and despite that I cannot find him referring to the book anywhere at this moment, we can safely assume he read it. It was a huge boom in his youth (look at Hérault going crazy over getting it for 20k livres), and as he was someone strongly inspired by rousseau as a teen i cannot imagine any other option.

Élisabeth is definitely to be trusted with the details she included, but if we were to take the suggestion from Courtois, she doesn't specify if the books belonged to Robespierre. Perhaps he did not own any works of Rousseau and books said to be read by him were borrowed, which would be very strange but let's assume it to be a possibility. Still, I think we can all agree that this option sounds very unlikely. Hating to leave the ask unsolved, I'd say that despite the lack of evidence there is a fair chance he had his own copy at some point.