Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  Rousseau had relocated from the Hermitage to a friend’s rickety house at Mont-Louis, on de Luxembourg’s estate. The maréchal called on him there and, on seeing the dilapidated conditions Rousseau was enduring, urged him to accept a suite in the “enchanting abode” of the Little Château at Montmorency while the Mont-Louis dwelling was renovated. The Little Château was the perfect setting: Rousseau worked in “deep and delightful solitude, amongst the woods and the waters, to the sounds of birds of every kind, and amidst the perfume of orange blossom, in a continuous ecstasy.”

  Rousseau’s relationship with his latest hosts casts light on his Platonic ideal of a pure, untainted friendship in which there was space for neither condescension nor any imbalance of power. In spite of their wealth and status, he approved of the maréchal and maréchale because they treated him as an equal; they never compromised the freedom he demanded for himself, or fussed over his income or means of survival. But although he revered his hosts, he divined that there was a strict limit to how familiar he could be with them, anguishing over this incompleteness of intimacy. He wrote to Mme de Luxembourg in October 1760: “Friendship, Madame! Ah, there lies my misfortune. It is good of you and the maréchal to use such a term, but I am a fool to take you at your word. You are amusing yourselves and I am becoming attached to you, and there will be fresh sorrows for me at the end of the game.”

  Meanwhile, relations between Rousseau, the citizen of Geneva, and Voltaire, who had been forced out of the city and now lived at Ferney, near the border with France, were fracturing. Voltaire had no patience for Rousseau’s assaults on property or the theater. He would later dismiss as abject hypocrisy Rousseau’s instructions on how to raise children. On his side, the proud citizen of Geneva resented Voltaire’s cultural influence in the place of his birth. In June 1760, he dispatched one his rudest-ever letters to the dramatist. “I do not like you, Sir. … You have ruined Geneva, in return for the asylum you have been given there. … It is you who have made living in my own city impossible for me; it is you who force me to perish on foreign soil, deprived of all the consolations of the dying, cast unceremoniously like a dog on the wayside. … I despise you. You wanted me to. But my hatred is that of a heart fitted to have loved you if you had wanted it.” Voltaire did not answer. To Mme d’Épinay he said, “Jean-Jacques has gone off his head.”

  Rousseau could feel quite at ease with one creature: the dog given to him when the animal “was quite young, soon after my arrival at the Hermitage, and which I had called Duke … a title he certainly merited much more than most of the persons by whom it was taken.” Rousseau changed its name to Turc to avoid giving offense to the maréchal, who was a duke.

  In 1761, an accident befell Turc and he had to be put down. Rousseau was inconsolable. “Although poor Turc was only a dog he possessed sensibility, disinterestedness and good nature. Alas! As you observe, how many pretended friends fall short of him in worth!” Several of Rousseau’s correspondents expressed their sympathy and talked of finding a substitute. The maréchal said the one possibility he had seen so far was “too pretty” for Rousseau’s taste. A grief-stricken Rousseau asked them to desist. “It is not another dog I must have, but another Turc, and my Turc is unique. Losses of that kind are not replaceable. I have sworn that my present attachments of every kind shall henceforth be my last.”

  THE YEARS 1761 and 1762 were Rousseau’s anni mirabiles. Settled in Montmorency, he produced a sweep of works that in their imaginative force, power of expression, and acute analysis broke free of the prevailing culture and confronted readers with the shock of the modern. First came his romantic epistolary novel, La nouvelle Héloïse, ou Lettres de deux amans, also entitled Julie, which he had begun in 1757. The seminal political tract On the Social Contract fired the fuse of revolt. Its opening phrase has resonated in the ears of revolutionaries down the centuries: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Then Rousseau overturned the established wisdom on the nature of childhood and education with a radical discourse on the training of the young, Émile. This last, in particular, was to bring the wrath of church and state down upon him. Together, these books mounted a sustained, fundamental challenge to religion and the established order. They also made Rousseau by far the highest-paid author in Europe.

  Héloïse, especially, was a phenomenon. Set against a background of pastoral bliss, it is a romantic tragedy that can be read both as an homage to nature and community and as a heartbreaking tug-of-war between virtue and passion. Illustraed by the finest engravers, the work was an instant and international success, its brew of natural love and natural beauty influencing a generation. Appreciative and tearstained letters to the author streamed in from across Europe. In Paris, demand so outstripped supply that booksellers saw a market in renting out the book by the hour (sixty minutes for twelve sous). Into the book Rousseau had poured his passion for Sophie d’Houdetot, an ardor that had left him sighing, weeping, taking to his bed, and experiencing attacks of palsy. She remained loyal to her absent soldier lover, though with misunderstandings aplenty on Rousseau’s side. “I was drunk with love without an object,” bemoaned the distraught author.

  But Héloïse was not the problem. Until Émile and On the Social Contract, Rousseau’s political writings had been indulged. Although the chief censor, the director of the book trade, Lamoignon de Malesherbes, had approved Émile, official tolerance of the author now abruptly came to an end. The fourth part of the book, entitled the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” caused the work to be condemned and burned for contesting the authority of the church and the rule of dogma. To the question “What role should the clergy play in a child’s training?” Rousseau’s answer was simple: none at all.

  BY 1762, ROUSSEAU had become one of the most controversial figures in Europe. In the Confessions, he looked back at “the cry of execration that went up against me across Europe, a cry of unparalleled fury. … I was an infidel, an atheist, a lunatic, a madman, a wild beast, a wolf.”

  Living under the wing of de Luxembourg, Rousseau was conscious of the commotion over Émile. He observed how congratulatory letters from such as d’Alembert were unsigned. “Everything that was said, was said with the strangest precautions, as if there had been some reason for keeping any admiration for me secret.” But he could not believe he was personally endangered. His patrons were more apprehensive. In the Confessions, he recalled that Mme de Boufflers, a friend of Mme de Luxembourg’s, “went about with a perturbed air, displaying a great deal of activity and assuring me that [her lover] the Prince de Conti was also taking active measures to ward off the blow that was being prepared for me.” Nonetheless, she asked Rousseau to return her note praising Émile.

  Mme de Boufflers sought to persuade Rousseau to go to England, where she could introduce him to several acquaintances including the “celebrated Hume,” whom she had known for a long while. She pointed out that if he were arrested and interrogated, he might incriminate his current patron, Mme de Luxembourg. (Rousseau agreed he might, as he always told the truth.) She also floated the notion of arranging a spell for him in the Bastille—presumably in comfort—as prisoners of the state there were immune from the Paris parlement’s power of arrest. The prospect did not appeal.

  THE EVENTS OF the night of June 9, 1762, in Mont-Louis make the most dramatic episode in the Confessions. They signaled that yet again the Genevan would have to move on—this time as the fugitive he would be for the next eight years.

  It was two in the morning. Rousseau was awake; he had just closed his Bible on the story of the Levite of Ephraim. Voices echoed, torches flared, and footsteps sounded in the stillness of the dark countryside. Mme de Luxembourg’s confidential servant, La Roche, burst in with a note from Mme de Luxembourg. It contained a letter from the Prince de Conti saying the Paris courts were determined to proceed against Rousseau with all severity: “The excitement is very high. Nothing can avert the blow.” Rousseau must go to Mme de Luxembourg, La Roche declared. She wo
uld not rest until she had seen him.

  Rousseau found her upset; he had never known her in such a state. But at this critical moment, he could rely on such influential friends to stave off his arrest. The maréchal arrived, trailed by Mme de Boufflers with the latest news from Paris. A writ of prise de corps had been issued against Rousseau by the parlement. Émile was ordered to be burned by the public executioner. However, Conti had secured a concession: if Rousseau escaped, he would not be pursued. He could even take a few days to think over his plans.

  Rousseau declined the breathing space. At four that afternoon he departed for Switzerland, riding in plain view in an open cabriolet belonging to the maréchal. His route took him through Paris, where he passed the officers of the law, “four men in black in a hired coach who saluted me with smiles.”

  He left Thérèse to follow him with his papers. It was the first time they had been separated for sixteen years.

  5

  Exile with the “Friendly Ones”

  Here begins the work of darkness in which I found myself engulfed.

  —ROUSSEAU, the Confessions,

  writing of the summer of 1762

  FROM 1762 TO late 1765, Rousseau’s fate was to be shunted along the northern shore of Lake Neuchâtel, in a futile quest for a secure refuge.

  The proud citizen of Geneva deliberately avoided his home city. He believed it was too susceptible to French influence, a judgment that was vindicated almost immediately. On June 18, 1762, Geneva’s ruling body, the Petit Conseil, assembled to discuss his case, voting the next day that if he ever stepped inside the city he would be arrested. They ordered the burning of On the Social Contract, as well as Émile. Helping to orchestrate the campaign against him was another member of the powerful Tronchin clan, Jean-Robert Tronchin, the prosecutor general in Geneva who had presented the case for suppressing the two books.

  Rousseau came to rest first in Yverdon, a spa town under the jurisdiction of Bern at the southern tip of the lake, on the edge of the triangle formed by Geneva, Zurich, and Basel. But the Council of Bern promptly followed Geneva’s lead. On July 1, 1762, a session of the Bernese Senate resolved both to forbid the sale of Émile and to expel the author from the republic. He was given fifteen days to leave. Behind this decree lay the hand of the Paris parlement. The parlement had exercised its influence before: at its behest, in 1758, the government of Berne ordered all the impressions of Helvétius’s Of the Spirit and of Voltaire’s Maiden to be seized for burning. The Bernese were capable of ironic resistance. On this occasion, the officer of justice came into the council to report: “Your magnificences, after all possible searches, throughout the town we have been able to find only a little spirit and not one maiden.”

  On July 10, 1762, Rousseau moved north to the village of Môtiers. The village sits above the lake at the bottom of the Val de Travers, a wide valley between the gorges of the Jura and Lake Neuchâtel, and midway between Yverdon and the fortress city from which the lake takes its name. Home was to be a run-down dwelling owned by the niece of an old friend. Ever sensitive to his independence, Rousseau insisted on paying rent. Le Vasseur soon joined him.

  Understandably, Rousseau remained on his guard. At the end of July, he wrote to Mme de Boufflers about the turbulent local priests: “They behold me with horror; it is with great reluctance that they suffer me to enter their temples.” He accused “the poet Voltaire” and “the juggler” (trickster) Tronchin of rousing the priests. He was waiting to hear from the king of Prussia about asylum in Môtiers, he added.

  By a quirk of dynastic fate, the territory of Neuchâtel was under the jurisdiction of Prussia, whose ruler, Frederick the Great, was the highest ranking of Rousseau’s admirers. In addition to being a brilliant military strategist, Frederick was a connoisseur of the arts and a patron of the Enlightenment, his application of Enlightenment principles to government earning him the accolade of “philosopher king” and the censure of “enlightened despot.” (Like Rousseau, he was also a pet lover: when his favorite dog was ill, he summoned ten doctors.) He had appointed a Jacobite exile as Neuchâtel’s governor, the hereditary earl marshal of Scotland, George Keith, Earl Marischal. Portraits of the earl show a thin, long, drawn face and an aquiline nose.

  The earl had fled Scotland as a youth after joining the Jacobite uprising of 1715; he then took part in the Jacobite-Spanish landing on the west coast in 1719. Following that fiasco, in which he was badly wounded, he was tried in absentia and outlawed. He entered Frederick’s service, becoming ambassador to France and to Spain. The king also bestowed on him the Neuchâtel governorship, which became a none-too-arduous retirement post. Marischal was pardoned by George II in 1759, but though he visited Scotland and bought back one of his former estates, he could not feel at home. The septuagenarian earl—”his opinions were as tolerant as his nature was kind”—became a father figure for Rousseau, who was a regular guest at his château, calling the governor mon père, and being addressed back as mon fils, or “my son the savage.”

  In requesting asylum, Rousseau showed both confidence in his standing and trust in the graciousness of despots. Earlier, he had been critical of Frederick the Great, but, according to Marischal, Frederick thought it wrong “that a man of an irreproachable life is to be persecuted because his sentiments are singular.” The king proffered wine, corn, and firewood, believing Rousseau would accept gifts in kind more readily than money. He also wanted to build him a hermitage with a little garden. Rousseau said no: he would rather eat grass and grub up roots than accept a morsel of bread that he had not earned.

  Earl Marischal had another useful contact: he was a staunch friend and admirer of David Hume’s. He cautioned Hume that Rousseau was vulnerable in Neuchâtel because of “the power of the people.” Britain was a better bet.

  The earl was not alone in thinking of Britain. Rousseau recorded that Mme de Boufflers strongly disapproved of his going to Switzerland, “and made fresh endeavours to persuade me to go to England. I remained unshaken. I have never liked England or the English; and all Mme de Boufflers’ eloquence, far from overcoming my repugnance, served for some reason to increase it.”

  Mme de Boufflers had initiated a correspondence with Hume not long before, sending him a note about how utterly “sublime” she considered his books. Like Earl Marischal, she sought to engage Hume in the quest to secure Rousseau asylum. She wrote to the Scottish historian in mid-June 1762 to say that she had advised Rousseau to go to England, adding a character study. There was praise for the Genevan’s “eccentric, upright heart [and his] noble and disinterested soul.” Dependency he dreaded: he would rather make his living copying music than receive benefits from his best friends. Only in solitude could he be happy. “I do not believe you will find anywhere a man more gentle, more humane, more compassionate to the sorrows of others, and more patient under his own. In short, his virtue appears so pure, so contented, so equal, that until now, those who hated him could find only in their hearts reasons for suspecting him.”

  Hume cast aside his customary moderation to live up to her enthusiasm for a man with whom he had no previous connection. He had, Hume gushed, “esteem, I had almost said veneration, for [Rousseau’s] virtue and genius. I assure your ladyship there is no man in Europe of whom I have entertained a higher idea and would be prouder to serve. … I revere his greatness of mind, which makes him fly obligations and dependence; and I have the vanity to think, that through the course of my life I have endeavoured to resemble him in those maxims.”

  Hume, who was in Edinburgh, added that he had connections with men of rank in London and would make “them sensible of the honour M. Rousseau has done us in choosing an asylum in England. We are happy at present in a king, who has a taste for literature; and I hope M. Rousseau will find the advantage of it, and that he will not disdain to receive benefits from a great monarch who is sensible of his merit.” However, the hero-worship was qualified. Hume disparaged Émile, in which, intermingled with genius, there was “some degr
ee of extravag ance. … [O]ne would be apt to suspect that he chooses his topics less from persuasion, than from the pleasure of showing his invention, and surprising the reader by his paradoxes.”

  The Scotsman offered the Genevan the use of his house in Edinburgh for as long as he liked. Later Hume explained, “No other motive was wanting to incite me to this act of humanity than the account given me of M. Rousseau’s personal character by the friend who had recommended him.” Hume also made overtures about a royal pension for Rousseau: he believed that assisting Rousseau would yield a propaganda triumph over the French worth a hundred victories in battle.

  In return, Rousseau, a spirit of intuition, imagination, and feeling, rhapsodized to Mme de Boufflers about the detachment of David Hume:

  Mr. Hume is the most genuine philosopher I know of, and the only historian who has ever written with impartiality. … I have frequently mingled passion with my researches; whereas his are enhanced by his enlightened conceptions and his beautiful genius. … He has contemplated, in every point of view, what passion has not permitted me to contemplate but from one side.

  However, Rousseau went on, he was deterred by the distance and expense of the journey to England. Nor did he relish inhaling the “black vapours” of London streets. “[H]abit has so attached me to a country life, that I die with spleen the moment I am no longer in the immediate vicinity of trees and bushes.”