Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  ROUSSEAU’S PERSONAL LIFE was also in transformation. Around 1745, he had entered upon the one close relationship that would endure until his death. Twenty-year-old Thérèse Le Vasseur waited on table in the hotel where Rousseau lodged, near the Sorbonne. An uneducated skivvy, a kitchen and laundry maid, she was the sole support of her unemployed and bankrupt parents. Rousseau was immediately struck by her “modest behaviour” and “lively and gentle looks.” He believed that he saw in her a girl with honest feelings, “a simple girl without coquetry.” “Thanks to her, I lived happily, as far as the course of events permitted.” He declared to Thérèse that he would never forsake her, but that he would never marry her. Although beneath him in the social order, she was far closer to him in class than the refined denizens of the capital’s gilded drawing rooms, to which he would soon gain easy access but in which he would never feel at ease.

  The first of their five children was born the following year. All five would be abandoned at the Foundling Hospital in Paris. Baldly stated, this sounds inexcusably callous, though at a time when the arrival of a child could spell disaster, the practice was not regarded as heinous. For the vast majority of its 600,000 inhabitants, the capital was a foul and grisly pit: sewage flowed in the alleys and lanes down to the river where drinking water was drawn. Rousseau recalled his initial impression of the capital in the Confessions. “I saw nothing but dirty and stinking little streets, ugly black houses, a general air of slovenliness and poverty, beggars, carters, menders of old clothes, criers of decoctions and old hats.” Life was a struggle for survival against smallpox and venereal disease. With some 30,000 practitioners, prostitution was a major industry. In 1750 alone, 3,785 children were deposited at L’Hospice des Enfants-Trouvés. There was not much hope for them: most died before their first birthday. Rousseau confesses to having had to use all his rhetorical powers to persuade Mlle Le Vasseur into letting her children go. Because marriage was out of the question, it was “the sole means of saving her honor.” However, he and Le Vasseur were in a full-time relationship, and that he did not even note down his abandoned children’s admission numbers is revealing. He never escaped the charge of inhumanity.

  IN 1752, THE forty-year-old Rousseau triumphed again, and in the most prominent of venues. His opera Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer) was performed before Louis XV in the court at Fontaine-bleau, and the king loved it. In his private apartments, he sang the songs and hummed the music. Rousseau, who had watched the opera in his working clothes, with a rough beard and uncombed wig, was nonetheless summoned to an audience with the king. Terrified that his bladder would let him down, he fled back to Paris. Louis would even have bestowed a pension on Rousseau had he not deserted the scene hotfoot. Diderot rebuked him for forfeiting the income and not thinking more of Le Vasseur and her mother. Rousseau agonized that in pocketing the king’s sous, he would inevitably have been compromised: “I should have to flatter or be silent. … Farewell, truth, liberty, and courage!”

  IN 1754, ROUSSEAU returned to Geneva for four months, reconverted to Calvinism, and reclaimed his citizenship. He was now toiling over a second competition essay for the Dijon Academy. Dedicated to the city of Geneva, Rousseau’s discourse, On the Origins of Inequality Among Men, was completed in May. It is perhaps his most radical work, highlighting the gap between the rich and powerful, on the one hand, and the poor and weak, on the other, and the spurious attempts that were made to rationalize the disparities. Humans, thought Rousseau, were mired in a condition of servitude, though they had originally been free, and he offered a historical sketch of how this tragic state of affairs had come about, stressing the creation and pernicious impact of private property. He did not win the prize, but the essay boosted his reputation further. He sent a copy to François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, who responded with a double-edged thanks, precipitating a relatively civil, if cool, exchange of letters. “I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race. … Never has so much intelligence been deployed in an effort to make us beasts.”

  THE WATCHMAKER’S son from Geneva now seemed destined for a life of riches, with entrée guaranteed to the most prestigious salons in the Republic of Letters.

  With all that within his grasp, he chose instead to seek seclusion in the countryside, amazing his friends and surprising a swelling pack of enemies.

  3

  Always a Qualified Success

  M. Hume is comparable to a brook, clear and limpid, which flows always evenly and serenely.

  —GRIMM in 1759

  AT A DINNER given in Edinburgh, when Hume was a child, the dog Pod was accused of making a foul smell. Cried young David, “Oh, do not hurt the beast. It is not Pod, it is me!” Recording the incident in her memoir, Lady Anne Lindsay commended the child’s honesty: “How very few people would take the evil odour of a stinking conduct from a guiltless Pod to wear it on their own rightful shoulders.”

  Lady Anne was the first of many to extol Hume’s singular goodness. In his account of Hume’s final days, Hume’s dear friend the economist Adam Smith stressed the older man’s exemplary character in phrases that likened him to Plato’s description of Socrates. “I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching nearly to the ideas of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” At sixty-six, stricken by terminal bowel cancer, Hume himself would look back on a life of such unrelenting virtues:

  I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments) I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments.

  “Frequent disappointments” was no exaggeration. Whatever the encomiums, Hume’s career (we should really say careers) was far from smooth or successful. Indeed, when he and Rousseau first became acquainted, Hume was only just beginning to receive the acclaim that we now regard (and he regarded) as justly his.

  David Hume was born in Edinburgh on April 26, 1711, into a moderately wealthy family, though, as a younger son, he could expect to have to make his own way in the world. His father was a comfortably well-off lawyer, Joseph Home of Ninewells, descended from the line of the earls of Home; his mother, Catherine, was also from an established family. Joseph Home died in 1713, leaving three children: the eldest, John; a daughter, Katherine; and David. David alone later changed the spelling of his name, because “thae glaekit English buddies” made it rhyme with “combe.”

  As a young man, Hume was briefly a student of law, but found his attention compulsively drawn to philosophy.

  When I was about eighteen years of age, there seemed to be opened up to me a new scene of thought, which transported me beyond measure, & made me, with an ardour natural to young men, throw up every other pleasure or business to apply entirely to it. The law, which was the business I designed to follow, appeared nauseous to me, & I could think of no other way of pushing my fortune in the world but that of a scholar and philosopher.

  He studied so hard that he became physically ill with what was diagnosed in 1730 as the “disease of the learned.” Whatever the disorder, it dogged him for five years; possibly, he never fully recovered—psychologically at least—from its impact. His search for a cure and a vocation took him briefly to a shipping firm in Bristol and, when that did not work out, to France; he lived first in Rheims, then in Anjou. His two-year visit yielded a manuscript he entitled Treatise of Human Nature.

  On his return in 1737 to London, the Scot was quick to compare England adversely with France, and the reception of the Treatise, published in 1738, would not have made him better disposed to the English. He borrowed a line from Alexander Pope to mourn what is now universally hailed as a masterpiece. “It fell dead born f
rom the press.” (Pope: “All, all but truth, drops dead-born from the press / Like the last Gazette, or the last address.”)

  Hume had expected a real financial return from the three-volume Treatise against his investment of time and intellectual energy. The commercial flop meant that, despite his exertions, he had only advanced down a career cul-de-sac. Putting philosophy aside, he returned to the family home at Ninewells and took up essay writing. He might not be acknowledged yet as a philosopher, but he could at least live by cultivating literary pursuits: essays, reviews, histories. His new calling would be man of letters. And here, at last, he had a modicum of success: Essays Moral and Political (1742) sold out in London.

  Yet, if Hume could turn his back on the Treatise so easily, others would not. In 1744, the chair of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy fell vacant in Edinburgh. Hume was balked by clerical opposition to the Treatise on the ground that he was unfit to teach the young. (The same hostility dashed his hopes of the Glasgow chair of Moral Philosophy in 1751, which went to Adam Smith.)

  His next career move was distinctly less elevated, but he was still struggling for money, and even men of letters must eat. In 1745, he became tutor to the violent, mad teenage Marquess of Annandale and spent an unhappy, though profitable, year at St. Albans. He was already toiling away on what would become An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; but in April 1746, when he gladly parted from Annandale and his devious entourage, the future, professionally and financially, was uncertain.

  However, on Sunday, May 18, an unheralded invitation came to join a military expedition departing on May 21. Hume jumped at it. He owed the opportunity to a distant relative, Lieutenant General James St. Clair, whose secretary he became. Britain was battling France in the final phase of the War of the Austrian Succession and St. Clair’s mission was the conquest of French Canada. Later, his orders were changed to an invasion of Brittany, for which no maps or charts were available—the (undeliverable) objective was to draw French forces back from the Low Countries. It was here that Hume witnessed action: soldiers slaughtered, sailors drowned; an officer, convinced he had failed in his duty, killed himself with what Hume saw as Roman dignity. At least military cuisine seems to have agreed with him: he emerged from the campaign inflated into the vast figure that has entered history.

  In 1747, St. Clair recruited Hume again, this time as secretary on a military mission to Vienna and Turin. In Vienna, protocol demanded that diplomats should curtsy when presented to the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. On seeing Hume’s waddling approach, she excused them. Hume wrote self-deprecatingly to his brother: “We esteemed ourselves very much obliged to her for this attention, especially my companions, who were desperately afraid of my falling on them & crushing them.” Then it was on to the northern Italian city of Mantua, where Hume kissed the soil that had produced Virgil, and Turin, where the mission ground to a halt once peace was declared.

  At this point we have a portrait of Hume from the future Lord Charlemont, the seventeen-year-old James Caulfeild, who qualified his physical description with the observation that “Nature, I believe, never formed any man more unlike his real character than David Hume”:

  His face was broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility. His eyes vacant and spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole person was far better fitted to communicate the idea of a turtle-eating alderman than of a refined philosopher. His speech in English was rendered ridiculous by the broadest Scottish accent, and his French was, if possible, still more laughable.

  He also recorded for posterity Hume in love, though his account reads suspiciously like a Restoration comedy. Hume, allegedly, adored to distraction a beautiful married countess, who led him on for her amusement. She hid Charlemont behind a curtain in her boudoir so that he could enjoy her toying with the obese, infatuated swain as he heaved himself down at her feet, fruitlessly protesting his devotion. Interestingly, given the later image of the plain man, Hume’s companions noted, with some mirth, how he adored his military uniform—all lace and gold braid—though Charlemont thought he looked like a trainband grocer.

  Hume and St. Clair returned to England in time for Christmas 1748. At last, aged thirty-seven, Hume was financially independent and able to pursue his vocation as a writer. In 1749, he departed London for Scotland, and entered a decade of prolific literary output and high achievement.

  Hume put down roots in Edinburgh, where he lived a hardworking but convivial existence, always careful with his money. He dined out as much as he could—four or five times a week—but never tipped (gave a “veil”). The servants appeared not to mind, as he made their masters and mistresses so happy. He ate well, and drank in moderation. He held little suppers: roasted hen and minced collops, washed down with a bottle of punch. He had his own house and a “regular family; consisting of a head, viz. myself, and two inferior members, a maid, Peggy, and a cat. My sister has since joined me, and keeps me company.”

  He published his twelve Political Discourses: “the only work of mine that was successful on the first publication.” A miscellany of history, politics, and economics, it reached three editions in two years. But there was also An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, “which, in my own opinion, (who ought not to judge on that subject) is of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best. It came unnoticed and unobserved into the world.” This was an exaggeration. Reviewers castigated the ideas, but admired the clarity.

  In 1752, he received some compensation for his failure to win the Glasgow chair with an appointment that carried public esteem in his home city. On January 28, he became keeper of the library (librarian) of the Faculty of Advocates (“a petty office of forty or fifty guineas a year,” he quibbled). It made him master of thirty thousand volumes, and rechanneled his ambition from essayist to historian—the step that would finally ensure his contemporary reputation. While philosophy could rarely move the passions, he reflected, historians were “the true friends of virtue.”

  EDINBURGH IN THE middle of the century was the best of all possible worlds for Hume. Scotland’s union with England in 1707 had brought economic prosperity and a cultural awakening, and with it a lively company of newspapers, journals, clubs, and improvement societies populated by lawyers, clerics, academics, doctors, and gentlemen who could now afford to leave their estates to live in their tight-knit capital.

  Although by disposition happier in small groups, Hume became more widely gregarious. The Poker Club, whose subject was politics and object the consumption of claret, assembled at Fortune’s Tavern every Friday. When in the city, Hume kept up his attendance until eight months before his death. And from 1754, the Select Society, of which Hume, Adam Smith, and the portrait painter Allan Ramsay were founders, staged debates for men of rank. It had broad interests and extensive cultural influences. Hume’s first choice of subject for debate was “Whether the difference of national characters be chiefly owing to the nature of different climates, or to moral and political causes?”

  Edinburgh’s men of rank included many of Hume’s regular correspondents: a cousin, the Reverend John Home, author of a tragedy, Douglas, and private secretary to George III’s Scottish favorite John Stuart, Earl of Bute; Dr. William Robertson, a historian whose reputation rivaled Hume’s own; Adam Smith, moral philosopher and economist; the Reverend Hugh Blair, minister of the High Church in Edinburgh, and the first professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University; the Reverend Adam Ferguson, professor of philosophy at Edinburgh University. It was said that if you stood at the Cross of Edinburgh, within a few minutes you could take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.

  Hume, while on clubbable terms with the ornaments of the Scottish Enlightenment, fitted less snugly into the official culture. In April 1754, his appointment as librarian was soured when three of the curators of the faculty struck out some French books ordered by Hume from London, describing them as “indecent, and unworthy of a pla
ce in a learned library.” (They included La Fontaine’s fables.) In the future, all his choices would be vetted, they ruled. However humiliating the insult, Hume needed the library for his researches, and so he came up with the stratagem of keeping the title while handing over his duties. He gave his salary to the blind poet Thomas Blacklock. Nevertheless, he resigned precipitately in January 1757, possibly to secure the post for his friend Adam Ferguson.

  A morsel of humble pie was worth it. His epic four-part, six-volume History of England appeared between 1754 and 1762, and the series became among the most popular works of history ever published.

  Hume wrote his studies in reverse chronological order, beginning with the Stuart monarchs, moving to the House of Tudor, and ending with the earlier periods from Julius Caesar. He made at least £3,200 on the whole history at a time when a man could consider himself well-to-do on £80 per annum. As well as financial rewards, there was public and private acclaim. Voltaire called it “perhaps the best ever written in any language.”

  Hume had identified a gap in the thriving book market. Although novels abounded, booksellers stocked little history. In Hume’s wake came other, widely praised histories of England, but his work outran them all, maintaining its classic status into the nineteenth century, by the end of which it had gone through more than a hundred editions. In the United States, the last student version was printed in 1910. That he was a philosophical historian distinguished him from his predecessors and contemporaries. In 1762, the Critical Review enthused that