by William Boyd
“But I do. I’ve known it since I saw you that first day in the Metropol.”
She looked down, blew a strong jet of smoke away to her left.
“But you’re a married man. You’ve got two kids—”
“Four. Now.”
“Jesus! Four?”
“Sonia had twins three weeks ago.”
“My God. Well, there you are.… It’s useless. We shouldn’t even be talking about it. I should never have called.”
She continued listing objections. I felt short of oxygen, like Duric Lodokian. I was breathing through mouth and nose but my lungs still felt starved of air. I had to divert her from the wife-and-children topic. She paused to take off her hat.
“See, I kept it blond. Memories of Julie.”
The idea seemed to fly up in my face, like a game bird started from heather.
“I was going to get in touch anyway,” I said slowly. “I want you to be in my new film. With Karl-Heinz again.”
“Oh yes. I read about it. But what part is there for me?”
“Someone called Madame de Warens.”
“I don’t know.…”
“You’d be wonderful.”
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea. What’s the film called again?”
“The Confessions.”
VILLA LUXE, June 22, 1972
Emilia has been acting strangely, lately. It’s all to do with that hole in the shutter, I’m sure. One day she was taciturn. Then yesterday she came wearing lipstick and some unattractive wooden earrings. I sense too that she doesn’t like Ulrike. It’s curious how women can become so proprietorial. I told her Ulrike had permission to use the beach. She was clearly irritated by this. I can’t be bothered trying to work out what’s going on. Could it be—however absurd it sounds—that she’s jealous? My God.…
It’s time I told you something of Jean Jacques Rousseau, for those of you unfamiliar with him. First I will give you the public image, the official version, one we can swiftly forget. Unfortunately my library here is impoverished. I can only quote from A Students’ Guide to European Philosophy by one Dr. Ida Milby-Low (M.A., D. Phil., Oxford), published in 1934. I apologize, but this is the mere husk of the man we are interested in. Bear with me.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712. His father was a watchmender [a watchmaker, in fact] and his mother died immediately after his birth. He received no regular education, but such as he had in the formative years of his life was augmented by a reading of French novels kept in his father’s library. In Rousseau’s infancy his father was obliged to quit Geneva as a consequence of a quarrel and the young Jean Jacques was placed first in the care of a country parson and subsequently an uncle. After a turbulent adolescence he was apprenticed to an engraver, who attempted vainly to discipline him. Deeply unhappy, Rousseau made his escape from this employer and fled from Switzerland to Annecy in Savoy, where he shortly made the acquaintance of one Mme. de Warens, a woman of facile morals [this is the voice of Miss Milby-Low—spinster don, I predict, with a moustache, and whose sole vices are a rare cigarette and a secret tipple from that sherry bottle in her desk drawer].
Mme. de Warens directed Rousseau to Turin, where he was converted to Roman Catholicism and was employed as a domestic servant by two prosperous aristocratic families. He might have risen to become the steward of one of these households had not his perennial instability caused him to run away again. He fled his responsibilities once more, back to Annecy and Mme. de Warens, who became, in Rousseau’s own parlance, his “Maman.”
There now followed a succession of temporary employments and wanderings. Rousseau took up music as his main career and worked intermittently as a chorister. He even composed an opera during this uncertain period of fleeting attachments to adventurers, which took him to Lausanne and Paris. Each time he returned inevitably to Mme. de Warens whom he had lived with first at Chambéry and then at Les Charmettes, a charming country house nearby. Rousseau continued his education here, in a period of some tranquillity, through a self-imposed course of various indiscriminate reading. Emotionally, however, his life was less calm. Mme. de Warens had introduced into her household a man named Witzenreid. Rousseau found himself unable to share his “Maman” with another and left Les Charmettes to take up work as an itinerant tutor. He had written little by this stage of his life and was quite unconscious of his genius.
In 1742 he decided to try and make his fortune in Paris on the strength of a new system of musical notation that he had devised. This was never popular and Rousseau remained ignored. In 1744 he took up with one Thérèse le Vasseur, an ignorant girl of low class [the voice of the senior common room again] who became the mother of his children.
Rousseau earned his living by copying music, secretarial work and the very limited success of his operatic comedies. In 1749, Diderot (q.v.) invited him to contribute to the French Encyclopedia (q.v.), wherein Rousseau wrote the articles on music and political economy. Thus he was drawn into the society of French intellectuals such as d’Alembert and F. M. Grimm, a German of gross impiety.
The first thirty-eight years of Rousseau’s life were passed in almost total obscurity. He occupied a succession of menial jobs and probably would have been content to remain with the encyclopédistes’ claque (who contrived to find the amiable civilization of monarchical France too despotic for their taste) had he not emerged as a figure of fame and renown with his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. In this he asserted—with improbable eloquence obscuring the unlikely paradox—that man is happier in a savage natural state than in an advanced civilized one. He became the toast of Paris and his Discourse proved to be the passport he sought to high society. [He did not seek this.]
In the meantime Thérèse le Vasseur had borne him five children, all of whom, and with no qualms, Rousseau had abandoned in succession at the door of the foundling hospital in Paris.
Fame and its trappings, however, consorted uneasily with the man who had enjoined the “noble savage” as an exemplary model for mankind. Rousseau returned to Geneva in 1754, promptly renounced his Catholicism and became a Calvinist and a citizen once more. His retreat did not last long. Society and its rich patrons proved to be too strong an allure and Rousseau accepted the offer of Mme. d’Épinay to occupy the Hermitage, a pleasant cottage on her estate in the forest of Montmorency. The peace and quiet of the countryside delighted him, but it was not too last. Mme. d’Épinay desired his company; Diderot and Grimm besought him to return to the salons of Paris; and then Rousseau fell in love with Mme. d’Épinay’s sister, the Comtesse d’Houdetot, who was mistress of the noble soldier-poet Saint-Lambert. This led first to complications, then to tension and recrimination, concluding in bitter acrimony among the participants.
With surprising ease Rousseau found another patron, the Maréchal de Luxembourg. Upon him now fell the honour of providing the philosopher and his doxy with a home [this is academic bitchery at its worst]. But new heights of celebrity awaited Rousseau. Within a period of eighteen months (1761–62) three large works were published: The New Héloïse, Émile and The Social Contract They presented revolutionary views on all the topics most vital to humanity and society: government, education, religion, sexual morality, family life, the source of our deep emotions and love.
This was Rousseau’s annus mirabilis but, as so often with the man, it brought only disaster in its train. Unorthodox views of religion expounded in Emile (a treatise of education in the form of a novel) offended the authorities. The book was condemned and a warrant was issued for its author’s arrest. Rousseau, however, was given every opportunity to escape and he proceeded quickly to Switzerland. But he was no longer welcome there and so moved to Neuchâtel, then Prussian territory. He lived quietly there in rural seclusion, began writing his Confessions and received occasional visitors, among whom was the young Scotsman James Boswell, later biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson (q.v.).
Conscious of the fragile nature of his state of
exile in Neuchâtel, Rousseau accepted the generous invitation of David Hume (q.v.), the philosopher, to come and live in England. He settled at Wootton Hall near Ashbourne. By this time the persecution complex from which he had always suffered took greater hold on him and degenerated to a chronic form of delusional insanity. He became convinced that Hume—his benefactor—was in fact plotting against him, and grew jealous of his fame. Rousseau accused him of intercepting his mail and a violent quarrel ensued, with Rousseau and Mlle, le Vasseur returning to the Continent. Then followed a nomadic period of brief sojourns in provincial France before Rousseau settled finally in Paris, tolerated and unmolested by an indulgent and forgiving government. He completed his Confessions (which was published posthumously) and composed the famous Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques and the serene Reveries of a Solitary Walker.
In Rousseau’s Confessions the bizarre compulsion to tell unsparingly the whole and entire truth about oneself was more original than edifying, but the more contemplative Reveries gave rise to a sense of pity for a man who Was, it must be admitted, his own worst enemy. He was a man in whom astonishing gifts were marred and undermined by serious defects of character and judgment. Selfishness and paranoia, vanity and reckless opportunism, base ingratitude, passion and prejudice ruled this simple, intermittently sagacious thinker. It is indeed true that Rousseau and his works irrevocably altered European thought and sensibility, but it must be adjoined that it was not always for the better. He died on July 2, 1778, at Ermenonville, of an apoplectic fit.
Apoplexy is the only adequate response to that final paragraph, which has to be the most contemptible and shameful epitaph ever bestowed on one of the great geniuses of modern history. I reproduce it merely as a small sample of what Jean Jacques had—and has had—to endure from the small-minded throughout his tormented life and beyond. I will not dignify Dr. Milby-Low’s evil innuendos, many inaccuracies and omissions by further comment. The rough shape of Jean Jacques’s difficult, unique life is there—we will illumine it further, later. In the meantime only two observations need to be made.
1. Be sure of this: nothing Milby-Low recounts here is missing from Rousseau’s Confessions, as you might be forgiven for thinking from the note of smug revelation that she sometimes employs. Rousseau himself was and is the source of all slander directed against him by pedants and prudes. It is all down in fearless candor in that magnificent book and the companion volumes—Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques and the Rêveries. No misdemeanor escapes him, from the great to the inconsequential: from abandoning his children to pissing secretly in a cantankerous neighbor’s simmering soup pot when she wasn’t looking. Rousseau is judged by Jean Jacques, not the Milby-Lows of this world.
2. Is it not curious that a life dogged with misfortune, riven with acrimony, disappointment and bitterness, is somehow perceived by the rest of mankind to be the unhappy sufferer’s own doing? True, there are people who are “their own worst enemy,” who pursue a helter-skelter ride to self-destruction. But at the same time, why can’t it be admitted that a man or woman can be cursed with filthy luck, can be denied opportunities available to others, can be surrounded by false friends and cozening flatterers? Why not? There is nothing in the scheme of things to say that this will never be the case—that it is always a result of one’s own misdirected Will. There is no guarantee of good fortune, no assurance that your allies will always be staunch, that unfairness and indifference will not always prevail. So why in these cases (Jean Jacques’s case) does the world howl paranoic, lunatic, misanthrope, ingrate, egomaniac?
I will tell you why. Because it makes people feel better, more secure. They can live, grudgingly, with a charmed life—there’s hope for us all, then—but a cursed life makes everyone uneasy. If they can lay all the blame on the victim, it makes Fate seem to be somehow under control—we play as big a part in our own downfall. We are somehow agents, responsible. Chance, the random and haphazard, the contingent, do not really dictate the way the world turns.
11
The Confessions: Part I
We began filming The Confessions: Part I in July 1927, a month later than we planned. Part I was to cover Rousseau’s life from his birth in 1712 up to 1740, when reluctantly and with heavy heart he decides to leave his beloved Maman, his lover and benefactress, with his rival, the detestable Witzenreid, and to seek his fortune elsewhere. Part II was to deal with his rise to fame and terminate with the scandal of Émile and flight to Switzerland. Part III—I had barely thought this out, I admit—was to deal with his last years: cold exile in England, the bitter quarrel with Hume, the return to Paris and the serene botanizing of his last years. Thus, broadly, was the great scheme I had conceived. Part I was ready to film, most of Part II was drafted and Part III, I felt sure, would almost write itself when we reached that stage three years hence. I felt intoxicated, full of vigor and enthusiasm, on the brink of a great adventure.
Meanwhile, Doon and I … Nothing happened that night after the meeting. We finished our coffees and kirsch and I walked her home. She allowed me to kiss her on the cheek at the door of her apartment. “I think you’ll like Madame de Warens,” I said.
“I hope so,” she said, sincerely.
After that meeting nothing could bring me to return directly home. I went first to Stralauer Allee to have Karl-Heinz confirm my excuse to Sonia, but Georg’s apartment was in darkness. Then for some reason I drove to the Tiergarten and walked down to gaze—superstitiously, I suppose—at the Rousseau-Insel, a small island planted with trees set in the middle of one of the lakes scattered through the enormous park. Karl-Heinz had told me about this island-monument. I had gone to visit it once or twice, more out of a sense of duty than inspiration. This evening it did not hold much of that last quality either. The trees were bare and patches of snow gleamed in the darkness like wind-scattered sheets of newspaper. I watched my breath condense round me, then evaporate, and tried to think seriously about the work that the next few years held for me, but my mind returned—inevitably—to Doon.… The warm weight of her hand in the crook of my elbow. The temporary moustache of whipped cream on her upper lip as she drank her coffee-kirsch. How the quick wet tip of her tongue had wiped it clean. Would she do Mme. de Warens?… I had not thought of her in the role owing to the rift that had developed since Julie, but now I wondered what had taken me so long to see that possibility. She would figure only in Part I, but it would still mean months of proximity. I exhaled. Was I sure I knew what I was doing, this Christmas night, with my wife and four children waiting, no doubt impatiently, for me to return home? No. Yes. Perhaps.… I turned and walked back to my car.
Throughout the first six months of 1927 I worked strenuously to set the vast machine that would produce The Confessions in motion. My key and crucial aim, my basic working maxim, was to reproduce the facts of one man’s life on film with an attention to detail that had never before been witnessed. Just as for me, as reader, Rousseau had presented himself in all candor for examination, so would I now offer to millions of spectators around the world the portrait of a man rendered in such intimacy, fidelity and verisimiltude that they would come to know him as they knew themselves. Nothing would be spared. It would be the story of the life of one extraordinary human being, but one who was heroic in his humanity alone. The individual spirit would have its great immortal document.
I had grandiose plans as to how this should be achieved and I intended to employ every trick and technique available to the modern film maker—and a few more that I had devised myself. I was going to extend the cinematic form to its very limits.
I was fortunate in that Aram had managed to supply the budget that this dream demanded. Such had been the success of Julie that large investments had been made in the film by a group of German financiers, Pathé in France and Goldfilm, a cinema chain in the U.S.A. Not a penny was forthcoming from my own country. Aram, meanwhile, had returned from the States with a hatful of investors for Realismus Films, and, most peculiarly, a new identity for
himself.
This was really bizarre. I went to see him the first morning he was back in the studio. The door to his office suite was open and a workman was replacing the nameplate. I took no notice and walked in. Lately, Aram had taken to wearing colored shirts but kept his collar white, regardless of what kind of suit he was wearing. Today he was in a heavy brown tweed and red shirt. We shook hands. He told me all the good news: Leo Druce had finished Frederick the Great (it was not a first-rate job but it would do; Aram was giving Joan of Arc to Egon Gast) and he was ready to take over as producer on The Confessions. The money was all there, all one and a half million dollars of it (“But no more, John,” Aram said). Doon Bogan was signed to play Mme. de Warens. We talked on about some more details: the new studios that were being converted from warehouses just outside Spandau, how many weeks we would need to spend filming in Switzerland, and so on. When we finished, I stood up and said.
“Well, Aram, I—”
“Ah, yes, that’s another thing.” He handed me a business card.
I looked at it. “Eadweard A. L. Simmonette,” I read. “Who’s he?”
“Me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve changed my name.”
“But you don’t spell ‘Edward’ like that.”
“Yes, you can. It’s recognized. But I want to be called Eddie. Eddie Simmonette. From now on, please, John. I won’t answer to Aram Lodokian.”
“Aram, Jesus Christ! Are you—”
His face went hard. He was the most even-tempered of men: to see such hurt and fury was disturbing.