the Queen: Marie Antoinette (1755–93) had been queen since 1774.
what I thought of women writers: in Book 5 of Émile, Rousseau argues that women should attach more importance to their domestic duties than to any literary talents they may have: ‘Even if a woman had real talent, any pretension on her part would diminish it. Her dignity lies in being unknown, her glory lies in her husband’s esteem, and her pleasures lie in her family’s happiness.’
all printed and even bound: an allusion to the conventional practice at the time of selling books unbound in the first instance; having it bound was a sign of the value that Mme d’Ormoy attached to her gift.
I found it quite unpleasant: the Introduction to Mme d’Ormoy’s The Misfortunes of Young Emélie includes exaggerated praise of Rousseau as being nothing short of her hero: ‘I know of nobody with a more sensitive soul. … I confess that this famous man is my hero, but since to praise his virtues is above a vulgar pen, and since a woman’s pen in particular is too weak to paint his portrait, I shall say nothing and be content to admire him, paying him in the depths of my heart the homage he deserves.’
her daughter: Anne-Jeanne-Félicité d’Ormoy (1765–1830), who would go on to marry the writer Simon-Pierre Mérard de Saint-Just and publish a number of works of her own, including a poem entitled The Four Ages of Man (Les quatre âges de l’homme, 1782) and a Gothic novel entitled The Dark Castle, or The Sufferings of Young Ophelle (Le Château noir ou les souffrances de la jeune Ophelle, 1798).
a footnote: at the end of Part I of The Misfortunes of Young Emélie, Mme d’Ormoy inserted an addendum, giving a passage to be inserted earlier in the novel, where there are three lines of dots. The text to be inserted includes stinging criticism of court society, and in particular monarchs who, since they listen only to what their courtiers tell them, neglect their people’s welfare: ‘If sovereigns knew all the wrong that is done in their name, they would weep at being kings. The whole purpose of royalty is to ensure people’s happiness, and this is the duty of a virtuous king, but it is difficult to make the truth reach as far as the throne; indeed, great care is taken to keep well away anyone who might tell the truth: the king’s people are dying of hunger, but they are presented to him as being happy.’
the Tuileries: the gardens that extend west from the present-day Louvre in Paris.
the King: Louis XVI (1754–93) had been king since 1774.
the Avignon Courier … funeral oration: on 20 December 1776 the Avignon Courier (Le Courrier d’Avignon) included the following item, written by the paper’s Paris correspondent on 12 December: ‘M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has died from the effects of his fall. He lived in poverty, he died wretchedly, and the strangeness of his fate accompanied him all the way to his grave. We are sorry not to be able to speak of the talents of this eloquent writer; our readers should be aware that the way he abused those talents forces us to say absolutely nothing here. There is every reason to believe that the public will not be deprived of his life story and that even the name of the dog that killed him will be found in it.’ The newspaper subsequently corrected this false report on the following 31 December, in an item dated 21 December.
if it had been God’s will: St Augustine seems not to have made this point, unless Rousseau is alluding to, and possibly misremembering, his argument that, even if there were no hope of divine salvation, it would still be preferable to strive for virtue and struggle against sin rather than simply give in to the latter (The City of God, XI. 15).
Growing older, I continue learning: a quotation from Plutarch’s Life of Solon, 2. 2 and 31. 3. Solon (c.638–558 BC) was an Athenian statesman, lawmaker, and elegiac poet. Plutarch’s Lives were translated into French by Jacques Amyot in 1559. In Book 1 of the Confessions Rousseau tells of the reading he did with his father at an early age, which included Plutarch’s Lives: ‘Plutarch, in particular, became my favourite author. The pleasure I took in reading and rereading him cured me in part of my passion for romances, and I soon preferred Agesilaus, Brutus, and Aristides to Orondate, Artamène, and Juba’ (pp. 8–9); see also the Fourth Walk (p. 33).
in the last twenty years: since Rousseau appears to have written the Third Walk early in 1777, this is presumably a reference to his break with Mme d’Epinay and his departure from the Hermitage in December 1757. Rousseau evokes his stay on Mme d’Epinay’s estate in the Ninth Walk (see p. 101).
a minister full of wisdom and religion: a reference to Jean-Jacques Lambercier (1676–1738), the pastor of the village of Bossey, near Geneva (now in the French département of Haute-Savoie), who educated Rousseau from the age of ten, together with his cousin Abraham, as Rousseau relates in Book 1 of the Confessions (pp. 12–24).
Madame de Warens: Rousseau, then aged fifteen, met Françoise-Louise de la Tour, the baronne de Warens (1699–1762), in Annecy, where she had fled to escape an unhappy marriage, in March 1728. Paid to seek out and assist potential converts to Catholicism, she sent Rousseau to Turin for instruction, and on 21 April 1728 he abjured Protestantism before being baptized a Catholic two days later. Rousseau and Mme de Warens subsequently became lovers, as Rousseau recalls in the Tenth Walk (p. 107). See also Book 2 of the Confessions (pp. 47–9, 53–4).
Fénelon: François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715), archbishop of Cambrai, to whom Rousseau also alludes in Book 6 of the Confessions (p. 223).
my fortune seemed to be about to become more firmly established: Rousseau turned forty in June 1752, by which time he had written and published articles on music for Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia (L’Encyclopédie, 1751–72) and had won the Dijon Academy essay prize with what was to become his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1751); in October 1752 his opera The Village Soothsayer (Le Devin du village) would be performed to great acclaim before the King at Fontainebleau.
a good, solid woollen coat: see also Rousseau’s account in Book 8 of the Confessions: ‘I began my reform with that of my appearance; I gave up gold trimmings and white stockings, took to a short wig, laid aside my sword, and sold my watch, saying to myself as I did so, with a feeling of unbelievable joy: I will never again, thank God, need to know what time it is’ (p. 354).
a position for which I was in no way suited: a reference to Rousseau’s appointment in July 1752 as cashier in the office of Charles-Louis Dupin de Francueil (1716–80), receiver general, a post from which he resigned later that year.
a different moral world that was opening up before me: a possible allusion to the ‘illumination’ he experienced on his way to visit Diderot in prison at Vincennes in August 1749, when he read about the prize-essay topic set by the Dijon Academy on whether or not the progress of the sciences and arts had purified morals. Rousseau describes this experience in Book 8 of his Confessions (pp. 341–2).
modern philosophers: an allusion primarily to Diderot, Grimm, d’Alembert, and d’Holbach.
Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar: the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar (Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard) was inserted in Book 4 of Émile. It is an account of the nature and basis of religious belief, in the course of which Rousseau criticizes the importance often attached in religion to miracles and revelation; he also criticizes the intolerance that exists between different religious denominations. It was primarily because of this Profession that Émile was condemned by the Roman Catholic authorities.
How to Profit by One’s Enemies: in this essay (De capienda ex inimicis utilitate) in his Moralia, which Jacques Amyot had translated into French in 1572, Plutarch argues that not only need one not suffer harm from one’s enemies, but one can in fact gain from them. For example, our enemies force us to be watchful for ourselves and not make the same mistakes that we condemn in them; it is also possible to demonstrate a number of virtues better in relationships with enemies than with friends, such as gentleness, forbearance, and magnanimity.
a volume of the abbé Rozier’s journal: the abbé François
Rozier (1734–93), a Jesuit priest and keen botanist, was the founding editor of the Journal of Physics and Natural History (Journal de physique et d’histoire naturelle), first published in 1771. Rousseau had met Rozier in Lyon in 1768 and had enjoyed his company, but by 1777 Rousseau evidently saw him as another of his enemies. The specific reference here may be to the August 1776 issue of the Journal, in which Rozier announced the foundation in Geneva of a society for the arts.
Vitam vero impendenti, Rozier: the Latin phrase, meaning ‘to the one who consecrates his life to truth’, is a modified quotation from Juvenal, ‘vitam impendero vero’ (Satires, IV. 91), meaning ‘to consecrate one’s life to truth’, which Rousseau had first used as his personal motto in 1758 in the Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre (Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles).
the Know thyself of the Temple at Delphi: this Ancient Greek aphorism was inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Rousseau also refers to it at the beginning of the preface to the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, 1755): ‘Of all the areas of human knowledge, the most valuable but least advanced seems to be that of man, and I venture that the inscription on the temple at Delphi, for all its brevity, expresses a precept of greater importance and difficulty than all the thick tomes of moralists’ (trans. Franklin Philip, ed. Patrick Coleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 14).
an awful lie: a reference to the episode in Turin in 1728, when Rousseau, following the death of his employer Mme de Vercellis, stole a ribbon but blamed the theft on Marion, a servant girl who also worked in the household. Rousseau recounts this episode in Book 2 of the Confessions (pp. 82–3).
a truth that one should make known: it is unclear which book Rousseau is referring to, though it could be Samuel von Pufendorf’s On the Law of Nature and of Nations (De jure naturae et gentium, 1672) or Claude Adrien Helvétius’s On the Mind (De l’Esprit, 1758), both of which discuss lying and both of which Rousseau knew well.
The Temple of Cnidus: a reference to Le Temple de Gnide, a pastoral allegory about nymphs and shepherds in love, written by Montesquieu, who first published it anonymously in 1725 with a preface, supposedly written by the translator of a work found in the library of a Greek bishop. Cnidus (modern-day Tekir in Turkey) was an ancient Greek city of Caria where there was a temple of Aphrodite.
in order to have something to say: see also Book 3 of the Confessions, in which Rousseau bemoans his ‘slowness of thought’: his ideas, he says, are ‘confused, slow to take shape, and only ever occur to me afterwards’ (p. 110).
Monsieur Foulquier: a reference to François-Joseph Foulquier (1744–89), a naturalist and engraver who went on to become the Intendant first of Guadeloupe and then of Martinique, where he died.
Benoît: a reference to Pierre-Antoine Benoît (1721?–96?), future editor, with the marquis de Girardin, of a posthumous collection of Rousseau’s musical works, entitled Consolations for the Miseries of My Life (Consolations des misères de ma vie, 1781).
I had not had that happiness: this is untrue, since between 1746 and 1752, Rousseau and Thérèse had had five children, all of whom they gave up to the Foundlings’ Hospital.
to lay claim to virtue: this paragraph recalls the opening of Book 1 of the Confessions: ‘I have concealed nothing that was ill, added nothing that was good, and if I have sometimes used some indifferent ornamentation, this has only ever been to fill a void occasioned by my lack of memory; I may have supposed to be true what I knew could have been so, never what I knew to be false’ (p. 5).
painting myself in profile: this is the very criticism Rousseau levels at Montaigne in the preface to his Confessions in the Neuchâtel manuscript of that work: ‘Montaigne offers us a likeness, but in profile’ (p. 644).
had a calico works there: in 1706, having learned how to manufacture printed cotton in Holland, Antoine Fazy (1681–1731) opened his own factory in Les Pâquis, north of Geneva. In 1719 he married his third wife, Clermonde Rousseau (1674–1747), Rousseau’s aunt.
Magnanima menzogna!. . . Si bello che si possa a te preporre?: ‘Oh noble lie! Did ever truth presume | to claim with fairer title virtue’s throne?’ (Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem (1580–1), II. 22, trans. Max Wickert, ed. Mark Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 26). In Tasso’s epic poem, Sophronia, a Christian maiden of Jerusalem, confesses to a crime she has not committed in order to save the Christians from being massacred by the Muslim king. Rousseau was an avid reader of Tasso, to whose works he may have been introduced by the abbé de Gouvon as early as 1728, as he mentions in Book 3 of the Confessions (p. 95); in 1771–2 he began a prose translation of the story of Sophronia, which was first published posthumously in 1781, though it does not include the couplet quoted here.
a game of mall: an early modern French mallet-and-ball game, a precursor of croquet.
Plain-Palais: an area of open land to the south-west of Geneva.
I have not committed it: see also Book 1 of the Confessions, in which Rousseau admits that ‘it is not what is criminal that is the hardest to reveal, but what is laughable or shameful’ (p. 17).
the Lac de Bienne: a lake in the west of Switzerland. Rousseau stayed on the Île de St Pierre for six weeks from 12 September to 25 October 1765, a stay he also describes in Book 12 of the Confessions (pp. 623–34).
half a league: see the note to p. 15, above.
the stoning at Môtiers: a reference to the stones thrown by a mob at Rousseau’s house in Môtiers, a village in the Val-de-Travers in Neuchâtel, during the night of 6 September 1765.
the first signs of which I was already beginning to detect: a reference to the role of David Hume and the comtesse de Boufflers in persuading Rousseau to travel to England in 1766.
two months on this island: Rousseau was ordered to leave the island by the senators of Bern on 16 October 1765.
far niente: an Italian phrase meaning ‘do nothing’.
a man dedicated to idleness: see also Rousseau’s evocation of idleness in Book 12 of the Confessions: ‘The idleness I like is not that of the lounger, who sits there, arms crossed, wholly inert, and who no more thinks than he acts. It is at once that of the child, who is always in motion and always doing nothing, and that of the driveller, who rambles on endlessly while never stirring from his seat’ (p. 627).
Doctor d’Ivernois: Jean-Antoine d’Ivernois (1703–65), a doctor and naturalist from Môtiers. Rousseau notes in Book 12 of the Confessions that ‘the taste for botany I had begun to acquire from Doctor d’Ivernois, lending new interest to my walks, led me to ramble round the whole region, herborizing’ (p. 617).
Flora petrinsularis: that is, a work about the flora of the Île de St Pierre.
Systema naturae: the System of Nature (1735) is one of the major works of the Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), in which he outlines his ideas for the hierarchical classification of the natural world, dividing it into the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the mineral kingdom; the classification of the plant kingdom followed Linnaeus’s new sexual system, with species with the same number of stamens being treated in the same group. In Book 12 of the Confessions Rousseau describes his ‘passion’ for Linnaeus’s work, ‘a passion of which I have never quite been able to cure myself, even after sensing its deficiencies’ (p. 629).
La Fontaine asked if they had read Habakkuk: Rousseau seemingly misre-members here an anecdote told by Louis Racine in his Memoir on the Life of Jean Racine (Mémoire sur la vie de Jean Racine, 1752) about his father and La Fontaine, when Racine had given the fabulist a bible to flick through during a church service: ‘La Fontaine chanced upon the prayer of the Jews in Baruch, and overcome with admiration, he said to my father: “This Baruch was a great genius: who was he?” The next day and for several days thereafter, whenever he met someone he knew in the street, he would, once the usual compliments had been paid, raise his voice and say: “Have you read Baruch? He was a grea
t genius.”’ Instead of the Book of Baruch, one of the deuterocanonical books of the Bible (which are considered non-canonical by Protestants), Rousseau refers to the Book of Habakkuk, the eighth book of the twelve minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible.
the pleasures of life: see also Rousseau’s account in Book 12 of the Confessions: ‘Often, abandoning my boat to the mercy of wind and water, I would give myself up to a reverie without object, and which, for being foolish, was none the less sweet’ (p. 630).
the pilot of the Argonauts: an allusion to the Greek mythological hero Jason, who led the Argonauts in the quest for the Golden Fleece.
took me by surprise: see also Book 12 of the Confessions: ‘I have always loved water passionately; the sight of it plunges me into a delicious reverie, which often, however, has no determinate object’ (p. 628).
the excessively complicated modern ones: this recalls Rousseau’s Letter on French Music (Lettre sur la musique française, 1753), in which he criticizes modern French music as being marred by complicated harmony and counterpoint. The Letter was one of Rousseau’s interventions in the so-called ‘Quarrel of the Buffoons’ in the early 1750s, which opposed proponents of French and Italian music, and which Rousseau discusses in Book 8 of the Confessions (pp. 374–6).
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World's Classics) Page 17