Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  BUT HOWEVER GENTEEL Buckingham Street or enticing the nearby shops and coffeehouses, however alluring the “see and be seen” parade of the fashionable in nearby St. James’s Park, for Rousseau the pressing issue was, yet again, where to settle. He liked neither London nor being the focus of attention, and he became preoccupied with moving to somewhere quieter, and as quickly as possible. Hume’s frustrating search for a haven acceptable to Rousseau contributed to his growing disenchantment with the guest he swore he would love all his days.

  Together, they scouted out various options. In Paris, it had been reported that Rousseau would live with a French market gardener in Fulham, just a couple of miles to the west of London, but the place proved too small and dirty, with an invalid occupying one of the two spare beds. An agreement was then reached for an ancient farmhouse in Wales. Rousseau liked the sound of its remoteness and the savagery of the countryside. However, the farm had a sitting tenant and could not be made ready in time. A more likely prospect was residence with a wealthy devotee of Rousseau’s, a Mr. Townshend—”a man of four or five thousand a year,” according to Hume. Rousseau could state his own terms. This plan foundered over Mlle Le Vasseur. Rousseau insisted that his gouvernante be permitted to dine at Mrs. Townshend’s table. That was not to Mrs. Townshend’s taste. Hume had still not met Le Vasseur, but he grumbled to Mme de Boufflers about the havoc she was causing, even at a distance of hundreds of miles.

  This woman forms the chief encumbrance to his settlement. … She governs him absolutely as a nurse does a child. In her absence his dog has obtained that ascendant. His affection for that creature is above all expression or conception.

  Rousseau then rejected the offer of a house on the Isle of Wight: the island was too expensive, with too many people and too few trees. The exile was aware that his finicky approach to choosing somewhere to lay his head must have been wearying to Hume, “You see I am grown difficult with respect to my host,” he confided to Mme de Boufflers.

  Rousseau was right about Hume’s feelings. Those who knew Hume well also sensed his growing impatience. A member of his Scottish network, William Rouet, recorded that “David Hume is busy to get Rousseau disposed of. Till then he is a kind of prisoner.” Hume was “confoundedly weary of his pupil, as he calls him; he is full of oddities and even absurdities.” Rouet was writing only three days after Rousseau’s arrival.

  Among those oddities was Rousseau’s attitude toward a young Swiss who was staying in Hume’s regular London quarters in Lisle Street: Louis-François Tronchin, the son of the detested “trickster” of Geneva, Dr. Théodore Tronchin. This Scottish-run boardinghouse might have been a recommendation of Adam Smith. He had taught Louis-François at Glasgow University. According to Rouet, Rousseau “looks upon Tronchin’s being here as a spy set by Geneva on him; and his accidentally being lodged where Hume always used to lodge, (and where he is to come as soon as Rousseau is fixed in the country) confirms him in this foolish conceit.” To Adam Smith he disparaged Rousseau as “a little variable and fanciful.”

  In other circles, regard for Rousseau was also waning. On February 5, Lady Sarah Bunbury took up her pen to write to Lady Susan O’Brian:

  By way of news Mr. Rousseau is all the talk: all I can hear of him is that he wears a pelisse and fur cap. … His dressing particularly I think is very silly. … He sees few people, and is to go and live at a farm in Wales, where he shall see nothing but mountains and wild goats.

  Indeed, Rousseau had had enough of London. On January 31, he went to lodge in the village of Chiswick, west of London. Hume returned, one imagines with relief, to his lodgings in Lisle Street and its familiar faces and accents.

  Rousseau could hope not only for a measure of tranquillity but the longed-for arrival of his lifetime companion.

  WHAT ARE WE to make of Thérèse Le Vasseur, and her relationship with Rousseau? Among his biographers, Maurice Cranston was no fan: “an extraordinarily ignorant woman.” Another biographer, J. Churton Collins, calls her that “wretched woman.” She has been called poisonous, coarse and degraded, a harridan, a shrew, even a Lady Macbeth figure. She is held responsible for aggravating her lover’s rows and inflaming his paranoia. She “had just enough intellect to assist the cunning of her depraved heart,” according to David Hume.

  Whether her detractors, all of them male, were justified is debatable. Some French noblewomen, Mme de Luxembourg for one, treated her with sympathy and kindness. But the obvious challenge to these depictions is to ask why Rousseau then stuck by her. And the obvious answer is that she had many virtues. Foremost among them was her loyalty. Living with Rousseau cannot have been easy. He was often short of money, he was stubborn, he was irritable and morose, and he made no secret of his lust for other women. He was also, by political necessity, a wanderer. Yet, throughout, Thérèse stayed at his side, forgiving this man of sensibility his infidelities, his idiosyncrasies, and his often crass selfishness. In his later life Rousseau had abruptly to uproot and flee, traveling in haste and alone, and then sending for her only after establishing himself in alien territory—alien for her, above all, a Parisian scullery maid, away not just from the comforts of the familiar streets of Paris, but from its easy banter, its patois and gossip. Still, James Boswell reported that despite the hardships and deprivations of such a life, Mlle Le Vasseur told him, “I would not give up my place to be Queen of France.”

  The first forced parting was at Montmorency. In the Confessions, Rousseau describes this farewell in affecting terms. He was with the Luxembourgs when the marshal sent for

  my poor “aunt,” who was consumed with cruel anxiety as to my fate, and as to what would become of her, and was momentarily expecting the officers of the law, without any idea of how to behave or how she should answer them. … When she saw me she gave a piercing cry, and threw herself into my arms. Oh friendship, union of hearts and habits, dearest intimacy! In this sweet and cruel moment were concentrated so many days of happiness, tenderness, and peace spent together, and it was with deep pain that I felt the wrench of our first separation when we had scarcely been out of one another’s sight for a single day in almost seventeen years. … When I embraced her at the moment of parting, I felt the most extraordinary stirring within me, and said to her in a burst of emotion that was, alas, prophetic: “My dear, you must arm yourself with courage. You have shared the good days of my prosperity. It now remains for you, since you wish it, to share my miseries.”

  In some ways, Le Vasseur was the personification of Rousseau’s idealized primitive being. As a domestic servant, she was close to the lowest rung in the social ladder (half a step above vagrants and prostitutes). That Rousseau felt tremendous affection for, and gratitude to, her is clear. And for good reason. She looked after him, nursing him during his bouts of illness, bringing him his chamber pot, cleaning his catheters, sewing, cooking (she was a first-rate cook of plain country fare, thick soups, veal, rabbit, pâté). Rousseau acknowledged his debt to her. In early 1763, when his bladder complaint worsened, the agony was such that he feared he was dying. He drew up his will, bequeathing her everything and “only regretting that I cannot better repay the twenty years of care and devotion that she has given me, during which she has received no wages.” When he fled Switzerland, and was still unsure where he was going to end up, he assured her that, “Of all the choices which are open to me I shall prefer that which will bring us together most quickly.” Rousseau knew her better than anybody. His descriptions of her character, “amiable,” with “a gentle disposition,” “a beautiful soul,” “an excellent heart,” are diametrically at odds with those of her critics. We can assume among those critics a degree of intellectual and class snobbery.

  Was she attractive? Reports differ: Boswell certainly found her so, but in 1761, a Hungarian count, Joseph Teleki, who visited Rousseau, related that, “A girl, or rather a woman, dined with us. … She was not beautiful, so no one would suspect that she was something else.” Unlike so many of Rousseau’s female acquaint
ances, she had worked long days of relentless labor in kitchens and washhouses that would have left her with coarse skin and roughened hands.

  Theirs was not a conventional love affair. Rousseau felt little passion for Le Vasseur—and she little for him. They both saved their ardor for others. Although they produced five offspring, by 1761 Rousseau confessed that because of the deterioration in his bladder, they had been living together for years as “brother and sister.” His attachment had become one of affection and habit rather than love. The terms Rousseau deployed to describe their relationship excluded a sexual connection. As well as “sister,” he talked of her as his aunt and his gouvernante—housekeeper or steward, in charge of the household. Still, in the Confessions (written after a twenty-five-year relationship), he said she was emotionally so “cool” that he had no need to fear other men.

  But if there was no passion, their personalities meshed perfectly. They almost never argued, though Rousseau once became upset when he discovered that his gouvernante and her mother, whom he looked after for years despite finding her an intense irritant, had not told him that they had accepted an allowance from Grimm and Diderot. “How could she, from whom I have never kept a secret, keep one from me? Can one conceal anything from a person one loves?” However, such complaints were rare.

  Never wanting to be dependent upon any other person, Rousseau made a single exception: Le Vasseur. In his autobiography, when describing his becoming acquainted with her, he explained that his strongest “most inextinguishable need” was for intimacy. And it was this he sought in the scullery maid; though this need was so deep that even “the closest union of bodies could not be enough for it.”

  Rousseau has been accused of relegating women in his writings to a secondary function in society. In Émile, Sophie is not educated to the same degree as the eponymous pupil—her skills of reading and writing will not be so useful—though Rousseau thought she should receive some education, not least so she could converse with her man. Julie in Héloïse embraces her destiny: “I am a wife and mother; I know my place and I keep to it.” On the other hand, at the time many women found his idealized notion of lover and mother appealing, and his female literary creations (like Julie and Sophie) were often stronger than the men—if more subtle and cunning in how they enforced their will.

  So, what intimate conversations would Rousseau and Le Vasseur have had? What conversations of any kind? Although Rousseau sent graceful letters to Le Vasseur, reporting on his condition and giving her domestic instructions, she could scarcely read and was constantly making elementary mistakes. When we are first introduced to her in the Confessions, there is a tone of perverse pride in the author’s account of her abject ignorance. It is quite possible that he took delight in defying social conventions and scandalizing his well-educated, well-dressed, and well-spoken friends.

  Thanks to [Thérèse], I lived happily, as far as the course of events permitted. At first I tried to improve her mind, but my efforts were useless. Her mind is what nature has made it; culture and training are without influence upon it. I am not ashamed to confess that she had never learnt how to read properly, although she can write fairly well. … She has never been able to give the twelve months of the year in correct order, and does not know a single figure, in spite of all the trouble I have taken to teach her.

  That he remained with this intellectually disadvantaged creature brought censure and bewilderment from friends and acquaintances. In public, he did not treat his gouvernante well. Occasionally he was eager to show her off, like a rich man defiantly displaying his conspicuously tattered clothes. More often than not, however, he treated her like a belowstairs servant. Indeed, many visitors to the Rousseau household assumed that that is what in fact she was. When Rousseau had guests, she was routinely dispatched to the kitchen or scullery. However, that was his choice. As we have seen over the Townshends’ refusal to dine with her, it was quite impermissible for anybody else to humiliate her in the same way.

  So far, wherever Le Vasseur had followed him, French had been the local language. Now her constancy and his dependency would bring the Parisian scullery maid to Chiswick, and exposure to a totally foreign land, language, and culture.

  10

  Down by the Riverside

  Kindness is in our power even when fondness is not.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON

  A young gentleman, very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad.

  —HUME on Boswell

  THE CHOICE OF Chiswick remains a mystery. Hume told Mme de Barbantane, “He would not stay in London above a fortnight. I settled him in a village about six miles from it; he is impatient to remove from thence, though the place and the house are very agreeable to him.”

  The simplest explanation is that Chiswick was the next village upriver from Fulham and Rousseau could afford it. But Hume would have been familiar with the location because his former pupil, the mad Lord Annandale, had a property there. Chiswick also enjoyed a historic reputation as a refuge—principally from the plague. It was close enough to London to keep in touch while detached from the stews of the capital: its air clean, the atmosphere bucolic, the gardens shaded by tall trees.

  For Rousseau, it was a staging post. He informed Du Peyrou that he still intended to go to the farmhouse in Wales, but would wait for Le Vasseur in Chiswick, where they would benefit from a few weeks of a serenity impossible in London because of the overpowering throng. He complimented the English on their manners. They knew how to show their esteem without fawning—quite unlike the populace of Neuchâtel.

  CHISWICK NESTLES SNUGLY on an oxbow bend in the Thames. In 1766, it had a population of about one thousand and was surrounded by farms and market gardens. Two other small villages lay to the northwest, and the three constituted the local parish. Five miles from the capital, it could be reached by foot (the river path led through Chelsea and Fulham), by boat (about an hour and a half), or by post chaise, along the main road to the west—a route notorious for highwaymen.

  Running parallel to the riverbank was the main street, Chiswick Mall; joining it at a right angle, Church Street was home to a row of small stores that precariously rubbed up against one another, like a set of dominoes on the verge of collapse. At the junction of the two roads was (and is) St. Nicholas’s Church, dating from the eleventh century. The less well-off, the bargemen and domestic staff, occupied higgledy-piggledy cottages around the back of the church. But elsewhere in the village, several mansions and a number of other substantial dwellings, many dating from the seventeenth century, bespoke affluence and substance. One of the preeminent painters of the century, William Hogarth, had a country retreat in Chiswick and was buried there in 1765; his wife, sister, and mother-in-law lived on in his redbrick house. (The garden still contains its original mulberry tree—bearing the scars of a World War II bomb.)

  However, there was little grandeur about Rousseau’s lodgings. Somehow he found rooms with, in Rousseau’s phrase, an “honest grocer, well regarded by his peers,” James Pullein; his wife, Elizabeth; and their two children.

  Pullein’s will indicates he was either deeply devout or feared the consequences of his business dealings. He was certainly apprehensive about the salvation of his soul, which he hoped could be entrusted to his “dearest Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ.” As a grocer, he would have sold dry provisions, flour, coffee, tea, sugar. The family probably occupied premises near Church Street, among a cluster of stores; the archives suggest they lived over the business. The 1766 rate books point to this being no ordinary shop. Its rateable value (known as the Overseers Rate) was sixteen pounds—a figure more than twice that of the majority of houses in Chiswick.

  The indications are that the Pulleins, who had only recently been living in a larger house, were in financial straits, one possible explanation for their taking on a lodger. Unusually, they had arranged to stagger one of the required taxes—the churchwarden rate—over four quarters, rather than settle it in one payment, as was the usual prac
tice. Rates funded a variety of social services, such as the local workhouse for the destitute, and paid for the ongoing battle to exterminate vermin who were destroying crops and produce. At the time the prickly Genevan was in the village, Chiswick was also overrun by hedgehogs. Sparrows were a terrible nuisance, too. The problem was so bad that the parish authorities placed a bounty on the pests’ heads: four pence for each hedgehog, a meager twopence for a dozen sparrow heads.

  Rousseau seems to have fitted quickly into the Pullein family. He sat in the shop, teaching the daughter French. When Pullein’s son went to Paris to learn the language (for his future career), Rousseau asked his publisher, Pierre Guy, to help him locate a cheap pension—or demi-pension “as the English never take supper.” The boy’s mother, said Rousseau, had been very attentive and he wanted to be of service to her. He thought Elizabeth Pullein “a wife of merit.” Guy should do what he could without burdening his time or purse, and he, Rousseau, “would count it as done for me.”

  However pleasing the Pullein family, the village itself was scarcely the haven of peace he sought. The shopping area near Church Street was the busiest and noisiest part. Within a three-minute walk there were at least four inns. There were two large breweries, from which arose a constant rumble of barrels being rolled and loaded onto carts. Next door was a slaughterhouse, where animals squealed their way to the butcher’s knife.

  Then there were the idlers and gawpers. Reports, perhaps apocryphal, had both locals and day-trippers from the metropolis coming to stare at the persecuted lion as he sat in the grocer’s shop. At least for Pullein, it was said, this had a beneficial effect: the constant traffic brought an upturn in business.

  Unlike in London, however, Rousseau could put the din behind him, going for long walks by the river and through the fields, and indulging his passion for botany. Apparently, he was taken botanizing by a professor at the request of George III’s favorite, the Earl of Bute: the former prime minister was a keen botanist and laid the foundation for the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew, just across the river from Chiswick. According to Hume’s biographer John Hill Burton, the professor was