by W. G. Sebald
Although Rousseau was by no means idle as an author in the few weeks he spent on the Île Saint-Pierre, in retrospect he nonetheless came to see this time as an attempt to free himself from the exigencies of literary production. He talks of how he longs now for something other than literary renown, the scent of which, as he says, revolted him from the very moment he first got a whiff of it. The dégoût Rousseau now felt with regard to literature was not merely an intermittent emotional reaction but something that for him always went hand in hand with the act of writing. In accordance with his doctrine of the formerly unspoiled state of Nature, he saw the man who reflects as a depraved animal perverted from its natural state, and reflection as a degraded form of mental energy. No one, in the era when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming, with enormous philosophical and literary effort, its entitlement to emancipation, recognized the pathological aspect of thought as acutely as Rousseau, who himself wished for nothing more than to be able to halt the wheels ceaselessly turning within his head. If he nevertheless persevered with writing, then only, as Jean Starobinski notes, in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable. The copying out of musical notation, which Rousseau was constrained to undertake in his earlier years and at the last in Paris, was for him one of the few means of keeping at bay the thoughts constantly brewing in his head like storm clouds. How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill is shown by Rousseau’s description of his apparently so happy days on the island in the Lac de Bienne. He has, as he writes in the fifth Promenade, deliberately forsworn the burden of work, and his greatest joy has been to leave his books safely shut away and to have neither ink nor paper to hand. However, since the leisure time thus freed up must be put to some use, Rousseau devotes himself to the study of botany, whose basic principles he had acquired in Môtiers on excursions with Jean Antoine d’Ivernois. “I set out to compose,” writes Rousseau in the fifth Promenade, “a Flora Petrinsularis and to describe every single plant on the island in enough detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days. They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon peel; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks—and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description. In accordance with this noble plan, every morning after breakfast I would set out with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systemae Naturae under my arm to study one particular section of the island, which I had divided for this purpose into small squares, intending to visit them all one after another in every season.” The central motif of this passage is not so much the impartial insight into the indigenous plants of the island as that of ordering, classification, and the creation of a perfect system. Thus this apparently innocent occupation—the deliberate resolve no longer to think and merely to look at nature—becomes, for the writer plagued by the chronic need to think and work, a demanding rationalistic project involving the compiling of lists, indices, and catalogs, along with the precise description of, for example, the long stamens of self-heal, the springiness of those of nettle and of wall-pellitory, and the sudden bursting of the seed capsules of balsam and of beech. Nonetheless, the leaves of the small herbaria which Rousseau later compiled for
Madelon and Julie de la Tour and other young ladies take on the aspect of an innocent bricolage in comparison with the self-destructive business of writing to which he usually submitted himself. A faint aura of unconscious beauty still hovers over these flower collections, in which lichens, sprigs of veronica, lilies of the valley, and autumn crocuses have survived, pressed and a little faded, from the eighteenth century. They can still be admired today in the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The herbarium Rousseau compiled for himself, meanwhile—eleven quarto volumes—was, up to the Second World War, preserved in the Botanical Museum in Berlin, until, like so much and so many in that city, it went up in flames one night during one of the nocturnal bombing raids.
Rousseau is only able to experience the true contrast to the employment which even botanizing represents when, on fine days, he rows far out on the calm waters of the lake. “There, stretching out full length in the boat,” we read in the chapter on the island, “and turning my eyes skyward, I let myself float and drift wherever the water took me, often for several hours on end.” The clarity of the sky arching over him out there on the lake is reminiscent of the description of the mountains of the Valais at the beginning of La Nouvelle Héloïse as a landscape freed from the veils of lower, denser atmosphere, which has something of a magical, transcendental quality about it and in which one forgets everything, even oneself, and no longer knows where one is. “The moment of utmost clarity of the landscape,” writes Jean Starobinski, who has studied the theme of transparency in Rousseau, “is at one and the same time the moment at which individual existence dissolves at its limits and is dreamily transformed into thin air.” To become totally transparent was, according to Starobinski, the greatest ambition of the inventor of modern autobiography. The symbol of this ambition is the crystal, for it is impossible to tell, Starobinski states, whether it is “a body in its purest state or, by contrast, a petrified soul.” Starobinski points out in this context, poised between alchemy and metaphysics, that Rousseau, in his Institutions chimiques, devotes a great deal of attention to the process of vitrification, quoting a passage in which Rousseau discusses the author of a volume published in 1669 entitled Physica subterranea, one Johann Joachim Becher, who derives his vitreous earth not merely from the realm of minerals but also from the ashes of plants and animals. “He assures us,” Rousseau writes of Becher, “that they contain an easily fusible, vitrifiable earth from which it is possible to make vases superior to the finest porcelain. Using procedures that he keeps shrouded in much mystery, he has carried out experiments that have convinced him that man, like all animals, is glass and can return to glass. This leads him to the most entertaining reflections on the trouble the ancients took to burn or embalm the dead, and on ways in which one might preserve the ashes of one’s ancestors by means of a few hours’ work, replacing hideous and disgusting cadavers with clean, shining vases of beautiful, transparent glass, tinted not with the characteristic green of glass made from plants but with a milky white color heightened by a slight tinge of narcissus.” This conjecture about the metamorphosis of the body into a pure substance, as it were freed from the ephemerality of existence—which Rousseau might well have seen as a metaphor for true artistic production—is, as Starobinski writes, in the final phase of his thought transformed into its “negative counterpart: pulverization, which kills the light and reduces human society to a dark, indistinguishable and impenetrable mass. No exchange is possible between opposites; Jean-Jacques’ transparency is solidified, the dark night outside him congealed. The veil, too, has changed: no longer thin and fluttering, it has descended to enclose the world it once concealed in a web of darkness.”
A dozen years filled with fear and panic await Rousseau after his departure from the Île Saint-Pierre on the twenty-fifth of October. He spends a few days in Bienne, which is under the jurisdiction of the Prince Bishop of Basel and where some of the citizens hope to be able to secure him the right to remain, at least for the winter. He spends the first night in the Croix Blanche and then finds quarters with Masel, a wigmaker of ill repute, in a room overlooking a stinking tanning pit. Nor are the other signs any more auspicious. Influenced by Berne, which in reality calls the tune in Bienne, several members of the Magistrat [municipal council] declare themselves opposed to offering asylum to the stateless refugee. On the twenty-ninth, therefore, Rousseau moves on again. From Basel he writes to Thérèse L
a Vasseur, the woman who has looked after him for twenty years and the mother of his five long-lost children, saying he is feverish, with a sore throat and sick at heart. His sole consolation is his dog Sultan, who has run for thirty miles ahead of the carriage like a courier and who now, Rousseau continues, “is lying asleep on my coat under the table as I write.” On the thirty-first of October, Rousseau leaves Basel, and Switzerland—“cette terre homicide,” as he says on the last page of his autobiography—for good. He is now resolved to take up the offer of asylum in England. The passport issued to him allows him to travel through France, breaking the journey at Strasbourg and Paris, where the world and his wife come to marvel at him and such Rousseau hysteria prevails that David Hume, who has made use of his ambassadorial influence to intercede in England on Rousseau’s behalf, writes to Hugh Blair that he would venture to raise by subscription the sum of £50,000 (an enormous sum in those days) in the French capital in under two weeks, if only Rousseau would allow it. He is such an object of fascination in society (writes Hume) that his housekeeper, La Vasseur, who after all is merely an uneducated woman, is more talked about than the Princess of Monaco or the Countess Egmont. “His very dog, who is no better than a coly,” Hume adds, “has a name and reputation in the world.” At the beginning of January 1766, Rousseau travels to England. There, alone in a foreign country, he is increasingly at the mercy of the latent paranoia to which he has always been prone and which, in exile, has become acute. His mood oscillates between despondency and exhilaration. A certain J. Craddock relates in his Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs, published in London in 1828, that Rousseau, despite knowing scarcely any English, on a visit to a theatrical production to which he was invited by Garrick was so overcome with weeping at the tragedy performed that evening, and so transported with laughter at the comedy which followed, that he was quite beside himself, “and that Mrs. Garrick had to hold the skirt of his caftan to prevent his falling out of the box.” Hume had the opportunity to observe these mood swings for himself when Rousseau came to confide in him about his suspicions and walked darkly up and down in his room for an hour without saying a word, only then suddenly to sit upon his lap, cover his face with kisses and assure him, with tears in his eyes, of his eternal friendship and gratitude. After this it was not long until he came to see Hume, too, as one of the most insidious among the conspirators plotting to deprive him of both his honor and his livelihood. The silent exchange of glances, which in La Nouvelle Héloïse indicate the harmony of souls, he now perceives as a threat. Constantly impelled by his fear in a hostile environment to investigate the slightest nuance, any minute irregularity he discovers in the behavior of a given interlocutor is taken as evidence that the latter is involved in the conspiracy being plotted against him. “For Jean-Jacques,” Jean Starobinski writes, “to live amid persecution is to feel caught in a web of interlocking signs.” Every now and then the states of anxiety abate a little. In Wootton in Derbyshire, where he found refuge in a country house belonging to Richard Davenport, a noble elderly gentleman whose acquaintance he had made at a social gathering in London, he enjoyed a brief period of respite, taking up his botanical studies again and writing some of the most lyrical pages of his Confessions. However—not least because Davenport himself was not present in the house to intervene in the misunderstandings which flared up here too—once again everything soon turned sour. Thérèse fell out with the servants, who did not take kindly to being ordered about by this upstart Frenchwoman, and things came to a head in the spring when Davenport’s housekeeper set down before the two guests a soup strewn with cinders and ash. Rousseau grows more and more convinced that his every action, and every change in his circumstances, through no fault of his own gives rise to consequences and chains of events beyond his control, making him a prisoner of his enemies conspiring everywhere against him. After leaving Wootton at the beginning of May 1767 in order to return to France, he writes from Spalding in Lincolnshire—a godforsaken place set among endless fields of cabbage and beet—to Lord Chancellor Camden, asking him to place an escort at his disposal so that he may be sure of reaching Dover safely and without undue delay. For three years after his return to France, Rousseau lives with Thérèse—often under an assumed name—in remote country seats of the nobility such as Château Trye in Normandy, or in small towns like Bourgoin or Monquin far away in the South, always with the shadow of outlawry hanging over him. When, in 1770, on condition of not publishing anything on political or religious questions, he receives permission to reside in the capital, attempting to eke out a living there by copying out sheet music, the morbid universe surrounding him can no longer be dispelled. “The children’s grimaces,” Starobinski writes, “the price of peas in Les Halles, the small shops in the rue Plâtrière—all appeared to be evidence of the same conspiracy.” This notwithstanding, Rousseau does still succeed in accomplishing a considerable amount. He finishes the Confessions and reads from them in various salons in sessions lasting up to seventeen (!) hours, to some extent anticipating Franz Kafka’s desire to be allowed to read aloud, to an audience condemned to listen, the whole of Stendhal’s Éducation sentimentale at one sitting. There follow a few more treatises, on botany and on the government of Poland, as well as the so-called Dialogues, in which Rousseau appears as the judge of Jean-Jacques. In his last two years while out walking he makes notes, on playing cards, for the
Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, which he completes in April 1780. After that he leaves Paris and moves into a small house in the park at Ermenonville which the Marquis de Girardin has placed at his disposal. He lives there for five more weeks in early summer. He rises at dawn, goes for walks, leaning on his cane, in the beautiful surroundings,
collects leaves and flowers, and sometimes takes a boat out onto the lake. On the second of July—he is sixty-six years old—he comes back from one of his walks with a terrible headache. Thérèse helps him into a chair. Felled by a stroke, he collapses onto the floor and, after a few convulsions, dies. Two days later he is buried at Ermenonville on the Isle of Poplars. In the years that follow, the Marquis transforms his estate into a parc du souvenir. He has a classical monument erected, the Swiss chalet is completed, a Temple of
Philosophy is constructed with an altar dedicated to reverie. Even the cabin in front of which Rousseau would often sit on a bench, gazing out over the peaceful landscape, is carefully preserved. The park has become a site of pilgrimage, and more than one lady sinks down before the grave on the island, pressing her bosom against the cold stone beneath which Rousseau’s earthly remains rest, until, that is, on the ninth of October 1794 they are transferred to the Panthéon. On this memorable day, a group of musicians performed excerpts from the opera Le Devin du village; the oak coffin, triple-lined with lead and further clad with an outer lead covering, was raised from the earth and taken to Paris in a grand and solemn cortège. In all the villages along the route the people lined the streets calling “Vive la République! Vive la mémoire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau!” On the evening of the tenth of October the procession arrived at the Tuileries, where a huge crowd was waiting with flaming torches. The coffin, covered by a wooden framework painted
with the symbols of the Revolution, was placed on a bier surrounded by a semicircle of willows. The main part of the ceremony took place the following morning, when the funeral procession continued on its way to the Panthéon, led by a captain of the United States Navy bearing the banner of the stars and stripes and followed by two standard-bearers carrying the tricolore and the colors of the Republic of Geneva.
WHY I GRIEVE I DO NOT KNOW
A memento of Mörike
When Eduard Mörike arrived in Tübingen to begin his studies at the Stift in 1822, the times had already changed. The previous year, the Emperor who had turned the world upside down all over Europe had died rather a miserable death on a rocky outcrop in the desolate wastes of the South Atlantic, and his precursor, the trailblazer with the red Phrygian cap, had also long since vanished f
rom the stage of history. Now the firebrand of the Revolution is only evoked to give a fright to little children. Through their startled eyes we see it flare up one last time outside the window, see it once more burst in at the gate, watch the flames rise from the roof beams and our house collapse in ruins. At the end of this terrible recollection, though, we learn that all that was a very long time ago, and the fire-raiser among us no longer:
Nach der Zeit ein Müller fand
Ein Gerippe samt der Mützen
Aufrecht an der Kellerwand
Auf der beinern Mähre sitzen
Feuerreiter, wie so kühle
Reitest du in deinem Grab!
Husch! Da fällts in Asche ab.
Ruhe wohl,
Ruhe wohl,
Drunten in der Mühle!
[Time passed—and a miller found
The rider’s skeleton, cap and all,
Leaning on the cellar wall
Still upon his bony mare.
Fire rider, oh, how coldly,
You ride to your grave, so boldly!
Whoosh, to ashes all does fall.
Rest in peace,
Rest in peace,
Below there in the mill!]
If, for the young Mörike, the terrors of the Revolution have already receded into a legendary and distant past, the closing acts of the Napoleonic era—the battles of Leipzig and Waterloo, which as a child he must have heard a great deal about—surely formed part of his own memories; and part of the dawning consciousness of his generation was shaped by the hopes for the sovereignty of the people which liberation from French rule was supposed to bring about. The “wild poet” Waiblinger, whom Mörike met in 1821 and whose writings for a long time continued to hold fast to the revolutionary ideal, is the most apt witness to this. Despite the heavy hand with which the states of the Holy Alliance had been governed for almost a decade, the dream of a national uprising was not yet dead. The clearly drawn lines of 1812 had, however, long since become blurred. Increasingly, visions of the future were becoming less and less clear-cut, and in the minds of the occupants of the Tübingen Stift, too, were becoming refracted into that ur-German blend of revolutionary patriotism and bourgeois circumspection, romantic imagination and double-entry bookkeeping, political zeal and poetical effusiveness, in which the progressive elements can scarcely any longer be distinguished from the reactionary. “On the one hand, there was great enthusiasm, with the likes of Byron, Waiblinger and Wilhelm Müller … for the Greek Wars of Independence against the Turks, and on the other hand a yearning for the contentment of peace, hearth and home,” writes Holthusen in his monograph on Mörike, in this context also recalling the well-known pen-and-ink drawing by Rudolf Lohbauer showing