I believed that my silence, interpreted by your conscience, had said enough; but since you purpose not to understand me, I shall speak. You have badly concealed yourself. I understand you, Sir, and you well know it.
No ancient mariner holding a wedding guest with his glittering eye could have been more compelling.
Before we had any connection, quarrels or disputes; while we knew each other only by literary reputation, you hastened to offer me your friends and your assistance. Touched by your generosity, I threw myself in your arms; you brought me to England, apparently to procure a refuge for me, and in reality to dishonour me. You applied yourself to this noble endeavour with a zeal worthy of your heart and with an art worthy of your talents. Success did not require great effort; you live in the grand world, and I in retirement; the public love to be taken in and you are made for deceit. However, I know one man whom you will not deceive, you yourself. You know with what horror my heart rejected the first suspicion of your designs. Embracing you, my eyes filled with tears, I told you that if you were not the best of men, you would have to be the blackest. In reflecting on your secret conduct, you sometimes say to yourself you are not the best of men; and I doubt that, with this notion, you will ever be the happiest.
I give your friends and you a free hand to carry on your manoeuvres; and with little regret I abandon to you my reputation during my lifetime, certain that, one day, justice will be done to both of us. As to your good offices in matters of interest, which you have used as a mask, I thank you for and excuse you from them. I ought not to have any further correspondence with you, or to accept any business, even to my advantage, in which you will be the mediator.
Adieu, Sir, I wish you the truest happiness; but as we ought not to have anything more to say to each other, this is the last letter you will receive from me. JJ Rousseau
Three days later (June 26), an upset and furious Hume was replying to Rousseau at length, his agitation coursing through every line. As he was conscious always of acting toward Rousseau in “the most friendly part,” and “of having ever given you the most tender, the most active proofs of sincere affection, you may judge of my extreme surprise on perusing your epistle.” He went on to demand particulars of the accusations and the name of the “calumniator” who, “I must charitably suppose,” had made them.
You owe this to me, you owe it to yourself, you owe it to truth and honour and justice and to everything that can be deemed sacred among men. As an innocent man; I will not say, as your friend; I will not say, as your benefactor; but I repeat it, as an innocent man, I claim the privilege of proving my innocence, and of refuting any scandalous lye which may have been invented against me.
Rather than write directly to his accuser, and presumably because he wanted proof of delivery, Hume addressed the letter to Davenport at Wootton, begging him to peruse the content before handing it over, and enclosing a duplicate of Rousseau’s thunderbolt. He called for Davenport’s aid in “the most critical affair which, during the course of my whole life, I have been engaged in. … You will be astonished, as I was, at the monstrous ingratitude, ferocity, and frenzy of the man.” His first concern was to have his nameless slanderer exposed, and in summoning Davenport to stand by his side, his tone became positively Shakespearean: “If it were necessary, I should conjure you by all your regards to truth and justice to second my demand and make him sensible of the necessity he lies under of agreeing to it. He must himself pass for a liar and calumniator, if he does not comply.”
While ingratitude might be read into Rousseau’s letter, the terms ferocity and frenzy scarcely matched its measured diction. Hume was the man possessed. Comically enough, this letter was opened by Davenport’s agent, Mr. Walton (who administered his estate), with Rousseau looking on. (If it had taken two days to reach Wootton from London, it must have arrived on June 28, Rousseau’s fifty-fourth birthday: an explosive present.) Seeing the copy of his own words, Rousseau resealed the packet and sent it on to Davenport by express. It was too long a story to narrate by mail, he said in a covering note. “We can talk about it when we meet. In the meantime, read, ponder, and see what you make of this affair.”
Somehow, a complete reversal of roles had taken place. Hume was convinced that Rousseau had devised a plot to dishonor him, and he now acted with the ferocity and frenzy of which he had accused his accuser.
On June 27, 1766, Hume wrote to d’Holbach in Paris, following up with a second letter on July 1. These letters, from which d’Holbach read extracts to an openmouthed audience in his salon, promptly disappeared. The editor of Rousseau’s Correspondance complète, Ralph Leigh, believed they were of such extraordinary violence as to have “disconcerted even Rousseau’s most unremitting enemies.” Two missives Hume dispatched to d’Alembert in the second half of July also vanished—only extracts have survived. The assumption must be that le bon David’s friends destroyed them in the interests of his good name. In the salons of the French Enlightenment, they did not approve of reason becoming the ugly creature of the passions. Hume’s anger, together with his failure to comprehend the sophisticated manners governing the Republic of Letters, as exemplified in Mme de Boufflers’s Rule of Life, had driven him to breach the conventions.
According to Amélie Suard, the wife of Hume’s French translator, she and her husband were at Mme Necker’s salon when someone bustled in from d’Holbach’s and reported that d’Holbach had just received a letter from Hume which began with the words: “My dear baron, Rousseau is a scoundrel.”
Hume retracted all the decent things he had ever said about Rousseau. He regretted keenly ever having taken an interest in the ex-citizen of Geneva, because he had indeed nursed a viper in his bosom. (Just as d’Holbach had warned him.) He rehearsed all the efforts he had made to gain a pension for the exile and fulminated that Rousseau’s snub was simply a declaration of war and the first signal of a campaign designed to dishonor him. What is more, he had proof that Rousseau must have planned this campaign for two months. His strategy was to let Hume pursue the pension on a verbal assent and then summarily and ostentatiously to refuse it. Rousseau would thus ingratiate himself with the opposition parties while compromising Hume with the king and the people. (Hume could have had no grounds at all for this: there was no evidence of Rousseau’s interest in the machinations of London politics.)
A letter to Hume from one of his admirers and translators, Mme de Meinières, on July 7, is suffused with the same bewilderment and shock with which Hume’s anguished tidings were received in Paris. No one doubted that Rousseau was ungrateful, wild, capricious, vain. But, and here she quoted Hume directly, that he was the blackest and most atrocious villain that ever disgraced human nature, and that one could lavish on him the descriptions of the lying, the ferocity, of the rascal—that was new.
Notably, Hume had shared his rage and distress with his French contacts before any other. Notably, too, he selected d’Holbach, unyieldingly antagonistic to Rousseau, rather than his passionate devotee Mme de Boufflers, who was also a Rousseau supporter and whom Hume was allowing to continue under the illusion that he intended to return to Paris to live in the apartment she had arranged for him in the Temple. (As “grand priest to the idol of the Temple,” sniffed Mme du Deffand.)
However, the Scotsman was in a stew of anxiety for his reputation in Britain, too. On the first day of July, he wrote to Professor Blair “earnestly desiring” him not to show anyone the letters he had sent him about Rousseau and to retrieve any copies. Indeed, how embarrassing their so recent encomiums must have seemed when the subject had been revealed as “surely the blackest and most atrocious villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world and I am heartily ashamed of anything I ever wrote in his favour.” There is the first glimpse of Hume’s intentions and his awareness of the related perils: “I know you will pity me when I tell you that I am afraid I must publish this to the whole world in a pamphlet which must contain an account of the whole affair between us. … You know how dangerous an
y controversy on a disputable point would be with a man of his talents.”
The idea of putting his side of the affair into the public domain continued to germinate. Thanks to Hume’s circle, Rousseau’s démarche was instantly the talk of le tout Paris. In one of his letters to d’Holbach, the contents of which were relayed around town, Hume spoke of a pamphlet to instruct the public in all Rousseau’s “atrocities.”
ON BOTH SIDES of the Channel, Hume’s flabbergasted friends now rallied to his support, all compassion on his abused philanthropy but all caution on publication. On July 6, Julie de L’Espinasse and d’Alembert wrote a joint letter, indicative of how eager they were to be involved. De L’Espinasse began: “What atrocities has [Rousseau] committed against you?” They had heard something about it from the baron. She asked for a summary of Hume’s reply to these atrocities—not out of curiosity or doubt but to be ready to defend him against Rousseau fanatics, many of whom were held in high public esteem. She surrendered the pen to an impatient d’Alembert. What had gone on? He, too, desperately wanted to be better informed so that he could persuade people of what he was already persuaded, that Rousseau had truly wronged Hume. However, he counseled Hume to think twice before subjecting his woes to public scrutiny: these sorts of quarrels only encouraged the zealots and gave the indifferent an excuse to blackguard men of letters.
Adam Smith adopted the same line, introducing a note of political realism. He also wrote from Paris (where he was enjoying the grand tour as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch). “I am thoroughly convinced that Rousseau is as great a rascal as you & as every man here believe him to be; yet let me beg of you not to think of publishing any thing to the world upon the very great impertinence which he has been guilty of to you.” By refusing the pension, Rousseau might have exposed Hume to some ridicule in the eyes of the Court and Ministry; however, said Smith, within three weeks le bon David would again be recognized as the man of honor he was.
On July 7, the original recipient of Hume’s distress (and the man who had assured it maximum publicity), d’Holbach, finally replied in person, sympathetic over Hume’s plight but joining with the others in trying to temper the broiling emotions of the exemplar of moderation.
He pointed out that Hume was not used to this mischief making. Readers of Hume’s History expected more history to come, not pamphlets to correct the incorrigible. Now that the dust had settled a bit, no doubt Hume would agree with the baron, and all with whom he had shared the news, that he should avoid an endless literary dogfight. He must not be embarrassed at having been duped through his goodness of heart. He should leave polemic to those who had no better way of passing the time. His French friends had let well alone when attacked by Rousseau. Hume would come to share this judgment when his serenity returned. He should remember that he was David Hume: his name was known and respected, and no one could injure it. However, if in spite of their guidance he did decide to publish something, he should send it to Mr. Suard at the Gazette de France.
D’Holbach also answered a query. Hume, pursuing his investigations into Rousseau’s resources and seemingly intent on demonstrating that the exile was not as poor as he claimed, had asked the baron to verify that Rousseau had received several thousand francs from the Maréchal de Luxembourg. D’Holbach reported back that he had heard from a friend of the banker Rougemont’s how money was sent to Rousseau in Môtiers through the Marshal de Luxembourg’s valet de chambre, the confidential servant La Roche. Once, La Roche had handed over 10,000 louis, about the sum Hume had mentioned [authors’ italics].
SECLUDED IN WOOTTON, the alleged recipient of the ten thousand louis had also been occupying himself with the affair. On July 10, he sent Hume the detailed case his mortified patron had insisted upon so ill advisedly.
The exile began by explaining that he was sick and in no condition to write. However, Hume wanted an explanation and so must have it. Then Rousseau unrolled the indictment in sixty-three lengthy paragraphs. Of course, he had already laid the foundations in his letter to Mme de Verdelin, but he must have taken pains to compose this philippic, its elegantly written final version belies the roughest of rough drafts.
At the commencement, he promoted the idea of himself as a man apart, implying that he was not involved in the quotidian politicking of Hume’s life. His world was one of feeling, of self-knowledge, a world that enabled him to rise above the need for legal proof of his allegations. From that basis, he could answer Hume’s confident demand for the name of his accuser. “That accuser, sir, is the only man in the world whose testimony I should admit against you: it is yourself.”
He began at the beginning, with his quitting Switzerland. The narrative then followed the general course mapped out to Mme de Verdelin, with the stylistic quirk that Rousseau treated Hume in the third person throughout. “I received a letter from Mr. Hume.” “I went to Paris to join Mr. Hume.” Possibly Rousseau envisaged sending the letter to others, perhaps Conway, but this literary device was a powerful one, severing their relationship while putting Hume at arm’s length from the reader as well as from Rousseau himself.
The structure is also conceived with a novelist’s eye for drama. The episode of Hume’s “four terrifying words” (on their journey to England) is alluded to midway, though out of its chronological order, but the words are not spelled out until almost the end, when they can be deployed against Hume to devastating effect. Je tiens J.J. Rousseau becomes successively the capstone of the author’s argument, his petrifying nightly visitation, and his instrument of emotionally charged repetition:
The critical situation to which he had now reduced me, recalled strongly to my mind the four words that I mentioned above and which I heard him say and repeat at a time when I had not really understood their force. … Not a night passes but I think I hear, I have you J.J. Rousseau ring in my ears, as if he had just pronounced them. Yes, Mr. Hume, you have me, I know, but only by those things that are external to me. … You have me by my reputation, and perhaps my security. … Yes, Mr. Hume, you have me by all the ties of this life, but you do not have me by my virtue or my courage.
Rousseau also brought a fine craftsmanship to a dramatized mockery of his victim. He records how he metaphorically “slapped” his patron’s face three times, but Hume did not feel it. Contemporaries thought this pillorying of Hume inspired, executed with the lightest of touches. Jean-François Marmontel, the popular author of novels, plays, and verse, praised the “sublime insolence” of “this trick of raillery.”
He first “slapped” Hume’s face, Rousseau recorded, when he failed to write to his benefactor after the King of Prussia letter was published in London—in adversity, he had turned elsewhere. The second slap came with Rousseau’s assertion (in his April 7 letter to the St. James’s Chronicle) that the spoof’s author in Paris “had an accomplice in London and that was what rendered his heart.” This had to mean Hume, but his protector pretended to believe that the only cause of Rousseau’s distress over the spoof was his vanity. “Vain or not, I was mortally afflicted; he knew it and wrote not a word.” The third slap was delivered when Rousseau replied directly to Conway over the pension, not rejecting it but excusing himself for the present, and not to Hume, who had undertaken the negotiations. “Third blow on the cheek of my patron, and if he does not feel it, that is assuredly his fault. He feels nothing.”
In concluding the long indictment, Rousseau framed a peroration in which he contemplated the possibility that he, not Hume, was in the wrong. It is easy to hear this powerful appeal being spoken to judge and jury.
You make me desire to be that despicable object. Yes, the situation in which I would see myself reduced, trampled prostrate at your feet, crying out for mercy, and doing everything to obtain it; publishing aloud my own unworthiness, and paying the most brilliant homage to your virtues, would be a state of blossoming and joy to my heart after the state of suffocation and death where you have placed it. If innocent, Hume should justify himself; if guilty, adieu for ever.
Taking the indictment as a whole, the effect is gothic, as hidden enemies cynically plot the fall of the innocent, and seemingly harmless actions carry a subterranean danger. When digesting it, Hume might have laughed over the contortions the plot demanded and wept over his erstwhile friend’s torments. He might have chosen to dismiss Rousseau as either a lunatic or an imbecile, recalling John Locke’s distinction between the reasoning of a madman and a fool: the fool reasons incorrectly on correct premises, while a madman reasons correctly on absurd premises. Instead, what he did was furiously to annotate Rousseau’s allegations, discovering “twelve lyes” to be communicated to the public in his preemptive campaign to shield himself from the eloquence of the most powerful writer in Europe.
16
Twelve Lies
This world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those that feel.
—WALPOLE
To a philosopher and historian the madness and imbecility and wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events.
—HUME
HE MIGHT NOT have believed in an afterlife, but Hume had been worrying about posterity. In a long and detailed note composed between July 15 and 25 for Mme de Meinières, who had begged to know if he had intended d’Holbach to publicize his letter, he explained his “many reasons for not concealing the affair.”
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