Another event succeeded in completely upsetting my peace of mind. Madame d’Ormoy* had been pursuing me for several years, though I had never worked out why. Her pretentious little presents and her frequent pointless and unpleasant visits were a clear enough indication that there was a secret aim behind it all, though they never revealed to me what it was. She had spoken to me about a novel which she wanted to write and present to the Queen.* I had told her what I thought of women writers.* She had given me to understand that the purpose of her project was to restore her fortune, to which end she required a protector; I had nothing to say in reply. She told me subsequently that, having been unable to gain access to the Queen, she had decided to offer her book to the public. There was no longer any point in my giving her advice which she did not seek and which she would not in any case have followed. She had talked about showing me her manuscript beforehand. I asked her not to do so, so she did not.
One fine day during my convalescence I received a copy of her book from her, all printed and even bound,* and I found in the preface such crude praise of me, so clumsily inserted and in such an affected manner that I found it quite unpleasant.* The kind of crude flattery that was expressed there was never a sign of true kindness, about that my heart could not be wrong.
A few days later, Madame d’Ormoy came to see me with her daughter.* She told me that her book was causing a great stir because of a footnote;* I had hardly noticed this note when I flicked through the novel. I reread it once Madame d’Ormoy had left, I examined the way it was phrased, and I believed I found in it the reason for her visits, her honeyed words, and the crude praise in her preface, and I decided that it was all designed to incline the public to attribute the note to me and, consequently, to direct towards me the blame that it could bring upon its author, given the circumstances of its publication.
I had no means of scotching this rumour or the impression which it might create, and all I could do was not to encourage it by allowing Madame d’Ormoy and her daughter to continue their pointless and very public visits. To this end I wrote the mother the following note:
Rousseau, since he does not receive authors, thanks Madame d’Ormoy for her kindnesses and asks her not to honour him with any further visits.
She replied with an apparently polite letter, but one written in the same way as all those written to me in these circumstances. I had barbarously plunged a dagger into her tender heart, and I should realize from the tone of her letter that, since she had such strong and sincere feelings for me, she would not be able to bear this break without dying. So it is that decency and honesty in all things are awful crimes in the world, and I would strike my contemporaries as being wicked and ferocious, even if my only crime in their eyes were that I was not as false and as treacherous as they are.
I had already been out several times and I even walked quite often in the Tuileries,* when I gathered from the surprise shown by many of those who met me that there was yet another story about me of which I was unaware. I finally learned that the rumour going around was that I had died from my fall, and this rumour spread so quickly and so persistently that more than a fortnight after I had learned of it, the King* himself and the Queen spoke of it as if it were a certainty. The Avignon Courier, as I was generously informed, in announcing this happy news, did not fail on the occasion to give a foretaste of the tribute of insults and indignities being prepared in my memory for after my death in the form of a funeral oration.*
This news was accompanied by a yet more extraordinary event which I only found out about by chance and of which I have been unable to discover any details. It is that at the same time a subscription was opened to pay for the publication of any manuscripts left in my house. From this I gathered that a collection of fabricated writings had already been prepared precisely in order to attribute them to me immediately after my death: for the idea that any of my real manuscripts would actually be published faithfully was the kind of stupidity which no sensible man could possibly entertain and which fifteen years’ experience have guarded me against all too well.
These observations, made one after another and followed by many others which were no less surprising, once more terrified my imagination, which I had thought was deadened, and the dark shadows which were insistently piled up around me revived all the horror that they naturally inspire in me. I exhausted myself trying at length to make sense of it all and trying to understand mysteries which have been made incomprehensible to me. The only unchanging outcome of all these enigmas was the confirmation of all my previous conclusions, namely that, since my own fate and that of my reputation had been fixed by the concerted efforts of the whole of the present generation, nothing I could do could save me from it, since it is utterly impossible for me to entrust anything to future ages without its first being passed through the hands of those that have an interest in suppressing it.
But this time I went further still. The accumulation of so many chance events, the honouring of all my cruellest enemies, favoured, as it were, by fortune, the way in which all those who govern the country, all those who control public opinion, all those in authority, and all those in positions of influence seem to have been hand-picked from among those who have some secret animosity towards me, in order to play their part in the general conspiracy, this universal consensus is too extraordinary to be purely coincidental. One man refusing to be a part of it, one turn of events going against it, or one unforeseen circumstance creating an obstacle to it would have been enough to bring it all crashing down. But every will, every twist of fate, and every change in fortune has consolidated this work of men’s hands, and such a striking combination of circumstances, which has something of the miraculous about it, convinces me that its complete success must be written among the eternal decrees. A great number of different observations, both in the past and in the present, convince me of this view so fully that from now on I cannot help regarding as one of Heaven’s secrets, impenetrable to human reason, the very plot that hitherto I envisaged only as the fruit of the wickedness of men.
This idea, far from being cruel or heart-wrenching, consoles me, calms me, and helps me to be resigned. I do not go so far as Saint Augustine, who would have been content to be damned, if it had been God’s will.* My resignation comes from a less disinterested source, it is true, but for all that it is no less pure and indeed more worthy in my opinion of the perfect Being whom I adore. God is just; he wants me to suffer; and he knows that I am innocent. This is why I am confident: my heart and my reason cry out to me that I shall not be disappointed. So let men and fate have their way; let us learn to suffer without complaining; everything will in the end find its proper place, and sooner or later my turn will come.
THIRD WALK
Growing older, I continue learning.*
SOLON often repeated this line in his old age. In a sense I too could say it in my old age; but the knowledge that experience has given me in the last twenty years* is a very sad one. Ignorance is still preferable. Adversity is without doubt a great teacher, but its lessons come at a cost and often what one gains from them is not worth what one paid for them. Moreover, even before one has acquired all this knowledge from these eleventh-hour lessons, the opportunity to use it has passed. It is in one’s youth that one should study wisdom; in one’s old age one should practise it. Experience is always instructive, I admit, but it is of use only in the time one has left to live. Is it really the time, when one is about to die, to learn how one should have lived?
Ah, but of what use to me is the knowledge that I have so recently and painfully acquired about my destiny and the passions of those who have shaped it? Understanding men better has only caused me to feel all the more keenly the misery into which they have plunged me, and this understanding, while revealing to me all their traps, has never enabled me to avoid a single one of them. If only I had continued to enjoy that weak-minded yet comforting trust which for so many years made me the prey and plaything of my noisy friends, completely unaware of all
their plots while at the same time being enveloped by them. I was their dupe and their victim, it is true, but I thought they loved me, and my heart enjoyed the friendship that they had inspired in me and believed that it was reciprocated. Those sweet illusions have been destroyed. The sad truth that time and reason have revealed to me by making me feel my misfortune has shown me that there is nothing to be done about that misfortune and that the only thing left for me to do is to resign myself to it. So it is that all the experiences of my old age are of no use to me in my current state, nor will they help me in the future.
We enter the race when we are born, we leave it when we die. What is the point of learning to drive your chariot better when you are at the end of the track? All you have to think about then is how you will leave it. If anything, an old man should learn the art of dying, but this is precisely the kind of study that people of my age are least interested in, indeed they think about anything but that. Old men are more attached to life than children are, and they leave it more grudgingly than young people. This is because, since all their labours have been for this life, they realize, as their life ends, that all their efforts have been in vain. All their concerns, all their riches, all the fruits of their unstinting labours, all this they leave behind when they go. They have not thought about acquiring anything during their lives that they could take with them when they die.
I told myself all this when it was the right time to do so, and if I have been unable to make better use of my reflections, it is not for want of having made them in a timely manner or having carefully mulled them over. Thrown as a child into the maelstrom of the world, I learned from experience at an early age that I was not made to live in it and that in it I would never reach the state for which my heart longed. So, giving up trying to find among men the kind of happiness which I felt I could not find there, my ardent imagination leapt over the whole span of the life that I had barely begun, as if it were unfamiliar territory to me, and sought instead to settle in a quiet resting place where I could make my dwelling.
This feeling, fostered by my childhood education and reinforced throughout my life by the great tissue of miseries and misfortunes with which it has been filled, has at all times prompted me to try to understand the nature and the purpose of being with more interest and determination than I have encountered in any other man. I have seen many men who philosophized much more learnedly than I, but their philosophy was, as it were, external to them. Wanting to be more learned than anyone else, they studied the universe to find out how it was arranged, in the same way as they might have studied some machine that they happened to see, that is, out of pure curiosity. They studied human nature in order to be able to speak learnedly about it, but not in order to know themselves; they worked in order to instruct others, but not in pursuit of their own inner enlightenment. All several of them wanted to do was to write a book, any book, as long as it was well received. Once their book was finished and published, its subject matter was no longer of any interest to them whatsoever, apart from when they wanted others to accept it and when they sought to defend it against attacks, but even then without taking anything from it for their own use and without even worrying about whether it was false or true, so long as it was not challenged. As far as I am concerned, when I have wanted to learn, it has been in order to know myself and not in order to teach; I have always believed that before instructing others, one has first to know enough for oneself, and of all the subjects that I have tried to study in my life surrounded by men, there is hardly one that I would not also have studied if I had been confined on my own, for the rest of my days, on a desert island. What one ought to do depends largely on what one ought to believe, and in everything that is not to do with nature’s basic needs, our opinions govern our actions. In accordance with this principle, to which I have always adhered, I have sought often and at length to discover my life’s true purpose in order to determine how to live, and I soon became reconciled to my lack of ability to conduct myself skilfully in this world when I realized that here was not the place to seek that purpose.
Born into a moral and pious family and then brought up benevolently by a minister full of wisdom and religion,* I had received from my earliest childhood principles and maxims—some would say prejudices—which have never entirely left me. When still a child and left to my own devices, attracted by kindness, seduced by vanity, deceived by hope, and forced by necessity, I became a Catholic, but I always remained a Christian, and soon my heart, swayed by habit, became sincerely attached to my new religion. The instruction and good example I received from Madame de Warens* confirmed me in this attachment. The rural solitude in which I spent the full flush of my youth and the study of good books, to which I completely devoted myself, reinforced my natural tendency towards affectionate feelings for her and made me almost as devout as Fénelon.* Lonely meditation, the study of nature, and the contemplation of the universe necessarily make a solitary person strive continually for the author of all things and seek with a sweet anxiety the purpose of everything he sees and the cause of everything he feels. When my destiny threw me back into the torrent of the world, I could not find anything there that pleased my heart even for a moment. Wherever I went I missed my sweet freedom and I felt indifference and disgust for anything that came my way that could have led to fortune and fame. Uncertain in my troubled desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt in the very glimmers of prosperity that, although I would have obtained everything I thought I was looking for, I would not have found that happiness for which my heart longed without knowing what it was. In this way everything served to cut off my affections from this world, even before the misfortunes that were to make me a complete outsider in it. I reached the age of forty, wavering between poverty and wealth, between wisdom and error, full of vices born of habit but without any evil inclination in my heart, living by chance, with no principles governed by my reason, and careless in my duties, though not neglectful of them, but often without being fully aware of them.
As a youth I had decided that my reaching the age of forty would mark the end of my efforts to succeed socially and of all my aspirations. I was determined, once I had reached this age and in whatever position I found myself, no longer to struggle to be released from it or to spend the rest of my life living from day to day without a thought for the future. When the time came, I had no trouble in carrying out my plan, and although at that time my fortune seemed to be about to become more firmly established,* I renounced it not only without any regrets but also with real pleasure. Freeing myself from all these lures, all these vain hopes, I devoted myself entirely to the kind of insouciance and peace of mind that had always been my main preference and most lasting predilection. I left the world and its vanities, and I renounced all finery: no more sword, no more watch, no more white stockings, gold trimmings, or hairdressing, but instead a very simple wig, a good, solid woollen coat,* and better than all that, I uprooted from my heart the greed and covetousness that give value to everything I was leaving behind. I gave up the position I occupied at the time, a position for which I was in no way suited,* and set about copying music by the page, an occupation for which I had always had a particular liking.
I did not limit my reform to external things. Indeed I felt that this reform demanded another, undoubtedly more painful but also more necessary, namely that of my opinions, and, determined not to go through the whole process twice, I undertook to subject my inner life to a severe examination that would order it for the rest of my days in such a way as I wished to find it at the time of my death.
A great change that had recently taken place in me, a different moral world that was opening up before me,* the irrational judgements of men, whose absurdity I was beginning to feel, though without yet realizing just how much I would fall victim to them, the ever-growing need for something other than literary notoriety, barely a whiff of which had reached me before I was already sickened by it, and finally the desire to follow a less certain road for the res
t of my career than that on which I had just spent the better half of it: all this forced me to undertake this great examination which I had felt I needed for a long time. So I undertook it, and I neglected nothing in my power in order to carry it out successfully.
It is from this time that I can date my complete renunciation of the world and that great fondness for solitude that has never left me since. The work that I was undertaking could only be accomplished in absolute isolation; it called for the kind of long and undisturbed meditations that the tumult of society does not allow. That forced me for a time to adopt a different way of life, which I was subsequently so glad to have done that, having since then interrupted it only against my will and for short periods of time, I returned to it most readily and limited myself to it quite easily as soon as I could, and when men later reduced me to living alone, I found that by isolating me in order to make me miserable, they had done more for my happiness than I had been able to do myself.
I set about the work that I had undertaken with a zeal in proportion to both the importance of the task and the need I felt for it. I was living at that time among modern philosophers* who resembled very little the ancient philosophers. Instead of removing my doubts and resolving my uncertainties, they had shaken all the certainties that I thought I had about those things which I considered most important to know: since, as ardent missionaries for atheism and very imperious dogmatists, they could not abide without getting angry anyone daring to think differently from them on any point whatsoever. I had often defended myself quite feebly because I hated debate and was far from adept at it; but I never adopted their wretched doctrine, and this resistance to such intolerant men, who moreover had their own aims in mind, was not the least of the causes that stoked up their animosity towards me.
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World's Classics) Page 6