Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  As the November chill gripped Môtiers, Earl Marischal resigned himself to the exile’s remaining there. He notified Mme de Boufflers that Rousseau had even turned down a proposal of accommodation at Colombiers, a medieval town on the lake, a stone’s throw from Neuchâtel, where the weather was milder and there were ample fruit and vegetables that would otherwise rot. “He is much more savage than any savage of America,” he said, meaning that while a hungry savage would accept fish offered by another savage who had caught too much, Rousseau would refuse. “I no longer talk to our friend about quitting his mountain.” In this letter, Marischal described his plan (“a mere castle in the air”) for Rousseau, Hume, and him to live in scholarly retreat on his newly recovered Scottish property, and added a paradox: “One of the principal reasons, which would induce Jean-Jacques to realize this project is, that he is not conversant in the language of the country. This, on his part, is a reason perfectly in character; and perhaps, after all, it is a good one.”

  Meanwhile, the long-distance paper relationship between Rousseau and Hume was evolving and deepening. In early 1763, Rousseau confided to Hume that he regretted trusting his own countrymen, who had treated him with insult and outrage, rather than going to England. Earl Marischal had

  made you so often bear a part in our conversation; he has brought me so well acquainted with your virtues, while I before was only with your talents; he has inspired me with the most tender friendship for you, and the most ardent desire of obtaining yours, before I knew you were disposed to grant it. Judge then of the pleasure I feel, at finding this inclination reciprocal. … Your great views, your astonishing impartiality, your genius, would lift you far above the rest of mankind, if you were less attached to them by the goodness of your heart. … I can hope only to see you united with [the earl] one day in the country you have in common, which will become mine. … With what transports of joy will I cry out on touching the happy soil where Hume and the Marshal of Scotland were born. “Salve, fatis mihi debita tellus! / Hic domus, haec patria est.” Hail land destined as my fate, here is my home, here is my country [Virgil, Aeneid].

  Of course, Rousseau had not the slightest intention of exchanging his Swiss for a Scots hearth. His objective was solely to communicate his amity, respect, and courtesy, and he did it with his customary rhetorical flair: he went on to explain that ill health prevented him from making so extended a journey.

  This was merely an excuse. Rousseau was no Anglophile and was unimpressed by the liberties that the English so prided themselves on. Representative democracy delivered only illusory freedom. “The English people think they are free,” states On the Social Contract. “They are badly mistaken. They are free when they elect members of Parliament; as soon as those are elected, the electorate is enslaved; it is nothing.” He worried that the English would remember a remark he made about them in a note in the second book of Émile: “I know that the English congratulate themselves on their humanity and the good nature of the nation, describing themselves as ‘good natured people,’ but much as they might proclaim this, nobody else repeats it after them.”

  OUTWARDLY, ROUSSEAU WAS settling in at Môtiers. He would sit on his porch weaving silk ribbons, chatting with passersby. The ribbons were presented to young women about to marry, on condition they breast-fed their babies rather than put them out to wet nurses. This, he said, was nature’s way. He had taken to dressing in an Armenian costume (made by an Armenian tailor who passed through Montmorency) and cut a striking figure—jacket, caftan, fur cap with a gold tassel, and a silk belt. The loose caftan made it easier for him to cope with his ever more taxing bladder condition. He consulted the local pastor about the garb: he said Rousseau could wear it, even to church. When Earl Marischal first saw Rousseau in Armenian robes, “he greeted me quite simply with Salamaleki (peace be with you). This ended the matter and I never afterwards wore any other dress.” He must have been an incongruous vision amid the crags, meadows, and vineyards of the valley. When opinion eventually turned against him, some locals convinced themselves he was possessed by a devil. “I was treated like a mad wolf as I walked in my caftan and fur hat amid the insults of the canaille and sometimes their stones. Sometimes as I passed their cottages I heard a cottager exclaim, ‘Bring me my gun and I’ll shoot him.’” In the winter of 1764, in need of more company, Rousseau acquired a dog and a cat; although the dog was of a nondescript breed, he named him regally “Sultan.”

  Visitors beat a constant path to his door from all parts of Europe; hundreds of letters arrived, some seeking his views, some insulting. From this period dates Rousseau’s friendship with the rich financier Pierre-Alexandre Du Peyrou, who suffered from gout but who was nonetheless persuaded by Rousseau to go on botanical expeditions, and then pursued his new recreation with the fanaticism of the convert. French by origin, but one of Neuchâtel’s great benefactors, Du Peyrou became a lifelong supporter of Rousseau’s, keeping his manuscripts and publishing the first collected edition of his works in 1782.

  Rousseau’s reputation was such that he was asked to mediate with young Edward Gibbon (the future author of History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) over Gibbon’s broken-off love affair in Lausanne with Mlle Suzanne Curchod, known to history as the wife of Louis XV’s banker and minister of finance, Jacques Necker, and the mother of Mme de Staël, the illustrious hostess and woman of letters. Rousseau replied: “I hope Mr. Gibbon will not come; his coldness makes me think ill of him. I have been looking over his book again [Essay on the Study of Literature]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either.”

  However, a bright, irrepressible Scot was more successful at winning Rousseau’s approval, and from him we have an engaging glimpse of his home life in Môtiers.

  On Monday, December 3, 1764, the twenty-four-year-old James Boswell pulled up at the maison de village and cast a glance toward a white house with green window boards similar to that in Émile, which he had read together with Héloïse. Before calling on Rousseau, he wrote a letter he described as “really a masterpiece. I shall ever preserve it as a proof my soul can be sublime.” The contents are comically Rousseauesque: “I present myself, Sir, as a man of singular merit, as a man with a feeling heart, a lively but melancholy spirit. Ah, if all that I have suffered does not give me a singular merit in the eyes of M. Rousseau, why was I made as I am? Why did he write as he has written?”

  Boswell was not too overcome to play his trump card—his acquaintance with his compatriot Marischal. Alerted by the earl, Rousseau granted Boswell an audience—on condition he did not stay long.

  To collect himself before the appointment, Boswell went for a stroll, “pensive, in a beautiful wild valley surrounded by immense mountains, some covered with frowning rocks, others with clustering pines, and others with glittering snow. … I recalled all my former ideas of J. J. Rousseau, the admiration with which he is regarded over all Europe, his Héloïse, his Émile: in short, a crowd of great thoughts. This half hour was one of the most remarkable that I ever passed.”

  Despite Boswell’s trepidation, Rousseau received him warmly. On first acquaintance, Boswell observed “a genteel black man in the dress of an Armenian.” He was to visit the household another four times, dining well chez Rousseau. One meal included “1. A dish of excellent soup. 2. A boulli of beef and veal. 3. Cabbage, turnip and carrot. 4. Cold pork. 5. Pickled trout which he jestingly called tongue. 6. Some little dish which I forget. The dessert consisted of stoned pears and of chestnuts. We had red and white wines.”

  Boswell’s note of his host’s conversation conveys the directness that French society had found so unpalatable. Here is Rousseau on the French: “The French are a contemptible nation.” On the Scots: “Sir, your country is formed for liberty.” On mankind: “Mankind disgusts me. And my housekeeper tells me that I am in far better humour on the days when I have been alone than on those when I have be
en in company.” On his critics: “They do not understand me.” On his temperament: “I was born placid. I have no natural disposition to melancholy. My misfortunes have infected me with it.”

  Rousseau showed off Sultan. As Boswell recorded, “He put some victuals on a trencher, and made his dog dance round it. … I think the dog’s name was Sultan. He stroked him and fed him, and with an arch air said, ‘He is not much respected, but he gets well looked after.’”

  The evenings were infused with a lively charm. Boswell remembers his host singing a song from scene five of Le Devin du village, and amusing a lady from Neuchâtel with a little ditty: “We live in a house / where goodies rain in abundance / Sugared sweets, dainty dishes / charming verses / inviting girls / And the mistress with one word / has the best of what’s on offer.”

  The beguiling visitor had gone out of his way to ingratiate himself with Thérèse, who acted as Rousseau’s gatekeeper. She had been waiting for him when he arrived still in a state of anxiety for that first encounter with Rousseau. He later jotted down: “She was a little, lively, neat French girl and did not increase my fear.” She was in fact two decades his senior. She told him, “I have seen strangers enough in the twenty-two years that I have been with Monsieur Rousseau, and I assure you that I have sent many of them packing because I did not fancy their way of talking.”

  Some spark might have passed between Mlle Le Vasseur and the priapic Boswell. Departing, he told her he wished to present her with a gift. What would she like? A garnet necklace, she said. The ardent young man proved as good as his word. It arrived from Geneva, “a modest token from a worthy Scot.” Boswell went on: “I shall never forget your accomplishments. You weave. You cook. You sit at the table. You make jokes. You get up; you clear the table; the dishes are washed; all is tidy and Mlle Levasseur is with us again. Only a conjurer could perform such feats.” On the same day, Boswell also felt the (guilty?) need to explain himself to Rousseau: he hoped his host would not mind if he corresponded with Le Vasseur from time to time. “I swear I have not formed a design to abduct your housekeeper. I often form plans that are romantic but never plans that are impossible.”

  IF, ON ONE level, Rousseau was leading a quiet, gentle, rustic existence, on another, his opinions were facing challenge from a phalanx of powerful figures—in Paris, Geneva, Neuchâtel, Môtiers, Bern. Never before had Rousseau experienced such all-around hostility, and he had to fight back from the fragility and insecurity of exile.

  The opposition was hydra-headed. Not long after his flight, the Sorbonne condemned Émile and censured Rousseau. Next, Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, condemned Émile for the views expressed in the fourth part of the book, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”: this affected Rousseau the more because he had always respected de Beaumont. He hit back with Letter to Christophe de Beaumont, a trenchant forty-thousand-word defense of his religious views. When, under pressure from the French, the twenty-five-member Genevan ruling Petit Conseil prohibited the letter from being published, the formerly “proud citizen” of Geneva resigned his citizenship in disgust.

  Rousseau now became caught up in the bitter political conflict that had riven the city-state for over thirty years, between its traditional ruling oligarchy that controlled the Petit Conseil (and were supported by France) and the disenfranchised bourgeoisie, the Party of Liberty, as Rousseau calls them in the Confessions. The Party of Liberty had added Rousseau’s treatment by the Petit Conseil to their campaigning grievances. The prosecutor general Jean-Robert Tronchin (whom Rousseau loathed but whose intellect he never underestimated) entered the fray as the council’s champion. With Letters from the Country, published anonymously in the autumn of 1763, Tronchin defended Geneva’s customary mode of government and alleged that Rousseau posed a deadly danger to both church and state. The adherents of the Party of Liberty were left reeling.

  Initially, Rousseau himself stood apart from the political battle. But the Party of Liberty pressed him to intervene, and with some hesitation he took on Tronchin with Letters Written from the Mountain. This polemical rejoinder, printed in 1764, robustly condemned the censorship of his work and charged the executive body in Geneva with despotism: they had trampled on the city’s traditions, and destabilized its delicate balance of powers.

  Rousseau’s original hesitation on intervening was justified: all prospect of a quiet life vanished. In the Confessions, he remarks wryly, “There seemed to be general astonishment in Geneva and Paris that such a monster as I could be permitted to breathe.”

  This exchange with Tronchin also caused a final and irreversible break with Voltaire. In late 1764, Sentiments des citoyens sur les lettres écrites de la montagne [Views of the Citizens on Letters Written from the Mountain] hit at Rousseau with a viciously personal attack that he saw on the last day of the year. It was anonymous, but in the literary culture of the day, that was no surprise. Authors used anonymity to shield themselves from assault or a challenge to a duel, and in France, the omnipresence of one hundred royal censors stimulated evasive tactics. Anonymity, pseudonyms, printing in Holland and smuggling over the border, disguising works of philosophy or pornographic fiction as history or letters—these were all commonplaces of publishing.

  Although Rousseau immediately accused a Genevan pastor (and old acquaintance) of being the author, on grounds of the pamphlet’s Calvinist style, Sentiments is now generally accepted as being from Voltaire’s pen. It painted Rousseau as heartless, ungrateful, and hypocritical. Some of the “secrets” it exposed about him, such as the abandonment of his children, were true; others were disingenuous or downright falsehoods.

  The pamphlet asked whether this “writer is a scholar who debates with scholars? No. He is the author of an opera and two unsuccessful plays.” It also claimed Rousseau was syphilitic and charged him with responsibility for the recent death of his mother-in-law. Rousseau was described as a man “who still bears the deadly marks of his debauchery and who in the costume of a mountebank drags with him from village to village and from mountain to mountain the wretched woman whose mother he killed and whose children he exposed at the gates of an orphanage … abjuring all natural feelings even as he strips himself of honour and religion.”

  The butt of these calumnies remained profoundly shaken by their tone and content, but posterity can be grateful to Voltaire. To clear his name, Rousseau finally decided to publish a fully open account of his life, feelings, and motives, and so conceived the Confessions. (He had been procrastinating over an autobiography since his publisher suggested it in 1761.)

  In Môtiers, the local priest, who believed he had obtained a prior pledge from Rousseau that he would not publish anything contentious, now banned Rousseau from the next Communion, and went on in his sermons to whip up opinion against him as a heretic. He even (unsuccessfully) attempted to have Rousseau excommunicated. The villagers were turning against him; the atmosphere became increasingly threatening. Rousseau was abused in the street. In King Frederick’s name, Marischal issued an order to protect him: it was ignored.

  On September 1, 1765, Rousseau’s house was stoned, though no windows were broken. The next night there was an attempt to break down the front door. The following week, on Friday, September 6, Môtiers held a fair with much drinking and rowdy merrymaking. Late at night, the house was attacked again, more violently than before, a terrifying experience as recollected in the Confessions:

  A shower of stones was thrown against the window and the door which opens on to the gallery and they fell on to it with so much force that my dog, who usually slept there and had started to bark, fell silent with fright and escaped to a corner, gnawing and scratching at the floorboards in an effort to escape.

  A rock “as big as a head” nearly landed on Rousseau’s bed, and he and Thérèse huddled together by a far wall. So many stones were hurled at the house that when the local steward finally arrived, he declared, “My God. It’s a quarry.”

  All the local notables wanted him to
go. “I gave in, and I took very little persuading; for the spectacle of the people’s hatred caused me such anguish that it was more than I could bear.” He and Sultan fled Môtiers, leaving Thérèse behind, and after one night with Du Peyrou in Neuchâtel, the philosopher and the dog arrived on Isle Saint-Pierre, in Lake Bienne, just beyond the city. The territory was under the jurisdiction of Bern.

  In his posthumously published Rêveries, Rousseau’s five weeks on Isle Saint-Pierre are portrayed as blissful, passed amid an Eden of orchards, meadows, vineyards, and woods, with a solitary dwelling. His chief balm was walking and botanizing—his ambition was to compile a list of all the island’s plant life. Rousseau and Sultan would ramble through a nearby island that was uninhabited, though Sultan disliked water and the boat journey made him nervous.

  Isle Saint-Pierre proved a short-lived sanctuary. Thérèse joined him in late September, but on October 18, “when I was least expecting it,” he received notice from the Bern authorities that he must leave their territory within two weeks. His plea to remain imprisoned on the island until his death, in return for being left in peace, was ignored. He told one correspondent that he was being “violently” expelled.

  Within three years, Rousseau had been driven from France, banned from Geneva, and forced out of Yverdon, Môtiers, and Isle Saint-Pierre. The king of Prussia’s protection had been to no avail. His enemies were triumphant. Europe’s foremost radical was on the run again.

  6

  The Lion and Le Coq

  The newspapers have given the rage of going to Paris a good name; they call it the French disease. —HORACE WALPOLE, October 1763

  His features were covered with mask within mask. When the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing the real man.