The Gilded Chalet

by Padraig Rooney

  Rousseau’s ‘Mamma’, Mme de Warens, and her welcoming bedroom in Les Charmettes, Chambéry

  Her image, ever present to my heart, left room for no other; she was for me the only woman in the world; and the extreme sweetness of the feelings with which she inspired me did not allow my senses time to awake for others, and protected me against her and all her sex. In a word, I was chaste, because I loved her.7

  Rousseau then began a long wandering apprenticeship as a teacher, dancing master, fiddler and valet de chambre, but always coming back to Mamma’s apron strings. He did a bit of tutoring here, hung around the great houses there, tried his hand at music, lusted after young women and a few older ones, and sang for his supper. The philosopher Edmund Burke, taking issue during the French Revolution with what he saw as Rousseau’s bad moral example, lamented his ‘men of wit and pleasure, of gay, young, military sparks, and danglers at toilets’. Burke lays the moral degeneracy of the French Revolution firmly at the feet of poor old long-dead Rousseau. These new tutors ‘infuse into their youth an unfashioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and lewdness’.8 Burke seems to be losing the plot here, although ‘danglers at toilets’ is worth it. But certainly the unschooled Rousseau had a jumped-up quality – and from Burke’s point of view he was continental to boot. Lackey to the rich and titled in Piedmont and Savoy, Rousseau seems to me like an early international schoolteacher, eavesdropping at the coffee klatches of the mothers, at times bored by their pushy wittering, at times amused by their advances.

  Obliged to give Geneva a wide berth by virtue of his conversion, Rousseau settled along the lakeshore in Vevey, the ‘small town at the foot of the Alps’ where the youthful scenes of his bestseller Julie take place. Madame de Warens infamously hailed from those parts, so he had to be circumspect:

  her birthplace was only twelve miles from Lausanne, I spent three or four days in walking there, during which a feeling of most tender emotion never left me. The view of the Lake of Geneva and its delightful shores always possessed a special charm in my eyes which I cannot explain, and which consists not only in the beauty of the view, but in something still more attractive, which moves and touches me … it is always the Canton of Vaud, near the lake, in the midst of enchanting scenery, to which it draws me. I feel that I must have an orchard on the shore of this lake and no other, that I must have a loyal friend, a loving wife, a cow, and a little boat.9

  Rousseau had more than forty different addresses in his life and the wife, cow and boat never materialised for long. They were his equivalent of a little cabin in the woods. In Vevey he lodged at La Clef just behind the market hall, where a plaque commemorates his stay. The old rooming house is now a restaurant serving fillets of perch from the lake, just as le petit liked them, done in butter.

  This is the landscape that Rousseau made synonymous with romance, Switzerland’s equivalent to the Lake District or Brontë Country. He invented the idea of a natural landscape as possessing beauty (and the idea of the ‘noble savage’), even though the shoreline here has been cultivated for over two thousand years, its vineyards stretching back to Roman times. The Savoy Alps rear across the lake, vines come down to the water’s edge, the lacustrine villages are crowned with pretty castles and a tradition of peace.

  Sometimes you just have to rattle the chains.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, writers and travellers came in pilgrimage to Rousseau’s fictional places. The Romantics only added to the way stations with an admixture of sulfurous sex and poetry. They were like rock stars who die young – members of the twenty-seven club – quickly canonised and thought of as bad boys in heaven, strumming their air guitars: Shelley on vocals, Byron playing lead guitar, Coleridge overdosing in the dressing room and refusing to come out. I think I’d put Wordsworth on a Moog synthesiser. Hazlitt, Dickens, Dean Howells, Twain and Henry James were the groupies. These writers of the nineteenth century broadened the audience to include a transatlantic readership and contributed to the development of Switzerland as a mass tourism destination.

  Rousseau sets a famous trysting scene, Julie’s kiss, in a grove of trees above Clarens, along the shore from Vevey. The feminist Mary Wollstonecraft urged the social reformer William Godwin to read Julie – it first appeared in English translation in 1761 – as a test of the tenor of his heart when they were courting. Their daughter Mary Godwin in turn pressed the novel on Percy Shelley. It became a kind of literary litmus test. Shelley read it to Byron as they were boating around the lake in the summer of 1816. The two of them hoofed it up the hill, Byron limping, in search of that hand-me-down grove of trees. Byron’s Childe Harold did the rest:

  ’Twas not for fiction chose Rousseau this spot,

  Peopling it with affections; but he found

  It was the scene which passion must allot

  To the mind’s purified beings; ’twas the ground

  Where early Love his Psyche’s zone unbound,

  And hallow’d it with loveliness…

  ‘Where early Love his Psyche’s zone unbound’ is a killer line. Byron’s early love was for a boy at Harrow, Lord Clare. Rousseau’s early love was, of course, Madame de Warens. She had had her own dalliance with a tutor when she was a girl and there is a sense in which Rousseau is living vicariously through her relationships. Here’s the effect of aristocratic Julie’s kiss on the humble tutor Saint-Preux: ‘Julie’s lips … placed on, pressed against mine, and my body clasped in your arms! No, lightning is no more fiery nor quick than the fire that instantly inflamed me.’10 Hot stuff.

  When Rousseau published Julie in 1761 he was forty-nine. In 1762 Émile, his book on education, was burned in Paris. In that same year Rousseau brought out The Social Contract, which together with Émile made him persona non grata in Geneva.

  The Social Contract is a political analysis of what binds people together ‘each to all and all to each’. Might does not make right, says Rousseau: the individual forfeits some of his freedoms for the good of all; the delicate balance of rights and duties is what constitutes civil society. Geneva as a city-state, with its Grand Council and freedom from princely rule, is clearly a template for this view of society. By seeing the relation between sovereign and subject as a social contract rather than power exercised by divine right, Rousseau ushered in the demos – the crowd. Along the way, he comments on slavery, the death penalty, the lawmakers (among whom he lauds Calvin) and the rise of nations – among which he counts Switzerland.

  Vevey town councillors in a 1905 wine festival poster

  The philosophical works were for the few. But Julie was wildfire in the popular mind and Émile proposed unorthodox religious and educational views; the reintroduction of breastfeeding, for example. Marie Antoinette was the first queen in centuries to breastfeed her children, courtesy of Rousseau. His writings made him the pariah of moral guardians (both Paris and Geneva issued warrants for his arrest) but the darling of the literate, especially the women.

  The gatekeepers were wary of novels. Calvinism conceived of God as the Great Author, so puny rivals were suspect. Edicts and censorship followed. If novels were to be admitted, then they should be moral and didactic. The spread of printing two centuries earlier had given way to the triumph of reading. Lost in reading, women neglected their wifely and household duties. In Switzerland still, the racks of pink-covered chic lit tempt the housewife at every post office.

  Rousseau had been living at the Hermitage in Montmorency outside Paris since 1757. The jobbing music teacher and gadfly gallant of the Savoy years had given way to the august man of letters, still squatting in other people’s houses. He feared a fatwa following the publication of Émile and was obliged to find refuge. He didn’t much like cities but was a great one for the cabin in the woods, the gazebo in the garden, the potting shed. He was on the lookout for a safe house across the border. In 1762 a friend offered him half a house in the hamlet of Môtiers in the Val-de-Travers, a remote valley in the Jura above Neuchâtel. Rousseau called it
‘Scotland in Switzerland’.

  The Val-de-Travers is infamous as the birthplace of absinthe, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. Had absinthe been distilled in Môtiers at the time, the world might have lost Rousseau’s Confessions (1781). The disreputable drink, after a century of proscription, was legalised again in Switzerland in 2005. A museum to the green fairy – the Absinthe House – sits not far from Rousseau’s house on the Grand Rue in Môtiers.

  I have a very beautiful fountain beneath my window and the sound of it is one of the things I love. These tall fountains in the shape of columns or obelisks, with water running through iron pipes into big pools, are a typical feature of Switzerland. I can’t express how agreeable it is to see all this beautiful water flowing in the midst of rock and wood during the hot weather. You feel refreshed just by looking at them, and tempted to drink from them when you’re not even thirsty.11

  Rousseau’s humble house was closed the Sunday I visited and after pacing the tiny gallery as the Master used to on rainy days – three paces, no more – I headed to the Absinthe House for a tour and a drink. In Rousseau’s time there can’t have been much to do in Môtiers except hike to the waterfall and back.

  I settled into reading at the bar while working my way through the museum’s ‘tasting menu’. It consisted of three types of absinthe: the first at 52% proof, the second at 63% and the third – the veritable green fairy, named Esmeralda, whose name means emerald – at 72%. On the label was a fairy in a skimpy nightie, holding a lantern. She had gossamer wings, blonde hair and a crown of bay leaves. She looked as though a Japanese manga team had designed her. The three respectable drams went down remarkably well with Jean-Jacques’ letters, which I called up on wi-fi, deep in the Complete Works of over twenty volumes.

  At Môtiers he wrote to dukes and barons, to titled ladies, to the literary pussycats of the day. Boswell came to call. Celebs, we might call them. I gave Esmeralda a complicit wink. I remembered, à propos of nothing, that the boat at the beginning of Visconti’s Death in Venice, conveying Aschenbach to his fate, is called Esmerelda. On second look the winged creature was more like a porno star than a manga fairy – one of those new floozies, all peroxide, piercings and tattoos. It took a while to scroll down to Rousseau’s letters addressed to the Maréchal de Luxembourg in January and February 1763.

  ‘Imagine a valley,’ writes Jean-Jacques – I’d laboured through him at college, had stalked his movements for weeks and felt this familiarity was earned – ‘a good half a league wide and two leagues long, through which runs a little river called l’Areuse, running north-west to south-east. This valley, lying between two mountain chains branching off from the Jura, narrows at either end.’

  He was a Genevan on the run, back in Switzerland after a lifetime in foreign parts. I felt sympathy for his predicament. He’d blotted his copy-book. This eighteenth-century Salman Rushdie went to ground under the protection of the King of Prussia (Neuchâtel was a principality in his kingdom) and Lord Maréchal Keith, a Jacobite exile from Britain who was governor of Neuchâtel. These were his minders.

  I thought I would rediscover here what delighted me in youth; all is changed: a different landscape, a different air, a different sky, different people; and, no longer seeing my mountains with the eyes of a twenty-year-old, I find them aged. I miss the good old days, indeed. We attribute to the world changes that have taken place in us, and when pleasure goes we think it gone from the world. … To know Môtiers, you need to have some conception of the canton of Neuchâtel, and to know Neuchâtel you need to keep the whole of Switzerland in mind.12

  Jean-Jacques provides the Maréchal de Luxembourg with a potted history of Switzerland, attributing the corruption of a pastoral way of life to the mercenaries who loaned their services to neighbouring armies. French dress, food and court manners become pretentious and airy-fairy once brought back to the cantons of the home country. ‘Gilt covers the whole surface’ is Jean-Jacques’ memorable phrase for the Swiss aping the beau monde of Paris. It’s the perennial story of old money and new money, the centre and the fringe. Here and there, glimmers of modern Switzerland flash forward to us from the age of Enlightenment: ‘So many bandits hide out in the country that those who govern can’t distinguish between wanted criminals and innocent refugees, or can’t be bothered to find out.’ Now that sounds familiar.

  The second absinthe bottle sported an even more curious label. It was called La Fine Clandestine. I had grown up with poitín in Ireland so Christophe Racine’s under-the-counter spirit from Môtiers would present no problem. The label showed a dance of death, a Totentanz, with a skeleton linked to a cadaverous doctor – a tall Doctor Death sporting a white T-shirt with a blue cross on it. He was dancing with a green-skinned, black-haired fairy in that nightie again; she had the addition of a garter strap and what looked like Jimmy Choo heels. This dance took place on the shore of Lake Neuchâtel under a full moon.

  Jean-Jacques liked to sneak out the back door for a walk without being spotted. He explored a branch of the river called La Côte aux Fées, the Fairy Shore, where the little people are said to have their abode. We can confidently say that he was away with the fairies. He compares the Areuse river to the Fontaine de Vaucluse, in that both surface fully formed as rivers. The Fontaine de Vaucluse is where Petrarch retreated with his lover Beatrice in 1338, so maybe Jean-Jacques is beginning to have delusions of grandeur.

  In The Confessions he turns bitter and critical of his hosts: ‘The inhabitants of Neuchâtel, who are fond of nothing but trifles and tinsel, who are no judge of genuine goods, and think that talent consists in long phrases.’13 He has it in for his hometown as well:

  determined to renounce my ungrateful country, in which I had never lived, from which I had received no kindness or assistance … Clergymen, relatives, bigots, persons of all sorts came from Geneva and Switzerland, not for the purpose of admiring or making fun of me, like those who came from France, but to scold and catechise me.14

  The winter of 1762–63 was one of the coldest of the century. The Thames and the Seine froze over and Môtiers was snowed in.15 Jean-Jacques wore his Armenian robes and hat, in which Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay had captured him (a painting now in the National Gallery of Scotland). Thérèse, Jean-Jacques’ live-in servant and mother of his four abandoned children, joined him. She was Catholic, Neuchâtel was a Reformist canton, and their irregular household didn’t help relations with the neighbours. Jean-Jacques’ dalliance with the Scarlet Woman of Rome may have been over, but Thérèse was off to Mass most Sundays while he sat at home upstairs writing his Confessions.

  Allan Ramsey’s portrait of Rousseau in Armenian costume, painted in London, 1766

  On 6 September 1763 matters came to a head. Villagers threw stones at the house. Jean-Jacques and Thérèse had to cower in the kitchen. It was like living in a mixed marriage up on the Falls Road circa 1969 with both the B-Specials and the Royal Ulster Constabulary knocking at the door. The writer and his common-law wife did a runner a couple of days later. Market day in Môtiers, with drinking and carousing, might turn ugly. He was on the road again.

  But Môtiers this evening looked the picture of peace after my three shots of absinthe. I also remembered that the current heir to the collapsed Principality of Neuchâtel is Patrick Guinness, of the stout family. Main Street had begun to darken and shadows lengthen.

  Then I spotted him skulking along by the wall opposite, decked out in his long Armenian robes that had something of the maxi-coat about them, the fur hat covering his bald spot. Rousseau’s get-up had a kind of oriental wackiness – Jean Paul Gaultier crossed with the Ayatollah. He moved fast for a man approaching sixty, determined to make it to the Fairy Coast before night.

  He must have had a good day at the writing.

  I never made it to the Ile Saint-Pierre on Lake Biel where Rousseau escaped after Môtiers. He lasted two months on the tiny island before he was chased out of there too. In Meditations of a Solitary Walker (1782), an old ma
n’s book, we hear the sound of settling after fitful upheavals.

  Of all the places where I have stayed (and there have been some lovely ones), none has left me as truly happy as St. Peter’s Island. I was only able to spend a couple of months on the island, but I would have spent two years, two centuries or even an eternity there without ever being bored. I look upon those two months as the happiest time of my life. It was such a happy time that it would have satisfied me throughout my life and I would never once have yearned to be in another place.16

  Each period of history reinvents Rousseau. The Enlightenment philosophers blamed his influence for the French Revolution. Byron in Childe Harold saw him as

  wild Rousseau,

  The apostle of affliction, he who threw

  Enchantment over passion, and from woe

  Wrung overwhelming eloquence17

  Mary Shelley makes Victor Frankenstein and his monster outcasts from Geneva. Later writers echo Rousseau’s picture of his hometown as closed to intellectual enquiry but open for business. In the mid-nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne summarised this Swiss mix of plain living and business acumen:

  This being a Protestant country, the doors are all shut – an inhospitality that made me half a Catholic … The Swiss people are frugal and inexpensive in their own habits, I believe, plain and simple, and careless of ornament; but they seem to reckon on other people’s spending a great deal of money for gewgaws.18

  Even Henry James doesn’t mince words about ‘the Presbyterian mother-city’: