Rousseau's Dog (15 page)

B
UT 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.

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:

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.

W
HAT 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

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 acquaintances, 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.

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.

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