Rousseau's Dog (24 page)

From Hume in reply came an apology for the “cheat” over the retour chaise, while making plain the initiative was Davenport's: “Mr. Davenport himself repents of it, and
by my advice
[authors' italics] is resolved nevermore to form such a project.” But there was nothing on the main issue. Nothing on Rousseau's tormented heart. Indeed, Hume was standoffish: “My good wishes attend you to whatever part of the world you may retreat; mixed with regret that I am so far distant from you.”

Over the next weeks, Rousseau reiterated his charges against Hume to several others, including Earl Marischal. Mme de Verdelin told Rousseau she was rocked by his assertions. The story had chilled her blood. Since reading it, she had found it difficult to order her thoughts and had been unable to close her eyes for more than two hours. She had burned his letter. She went through the allegations, attempting to soothe him. Hume was not capable of such things.

Earl Marischal declared himself astonished and disbelieving, though, given Rousseau's past persecution, he empathized with his vigilance. He then applied the same poultice as Mme de Verdelin—running through the allegations one by one in a vain attempt to dispel Rousseau's worries. And he advised Rousseau to say yes to the royal pension, if it were ever offered.

T
HAT OFFER, AS
we have seen, was made on May 2, and the royal pension finally brought Rousseau into direct confrontation with the blissfully unaware Hume.

When news of the king's agreement came via Conway, Hume had at once sent the general's letter on to Rousseau, recommending acceptance. Rousseau duly answered Conway on May 12, a response streaked with paranoia. But the design was clear: a man in torment, he was making a plea to delay his decision.

In elegant phrases, the exile expressed thanks to both the king and Conway. However, he explained, he was too upset to think clearly. “After so many misfortunes I had thought myself ready for all possible happenings. One has come upon me that I had not foreseen and that no honest man could have foreseen. It has affected me cruelly.” Consequently, no matter how important the issue, he lacked the presence of mind to think what action to take.

Hume must have been relieved to see the issue of the pension heading toward a conclusion, with only the administrative arrangements to be finalized. He had spent some of his influence with Conway, and when the payment was eventually settled, he could consider his obligations to his charge at an end. As Professor Hugh Blair noted on May 13, when thanking Hume for his entertaining anecdotes about Rousseau (“a high feast to all your friends”), “Much as you loved him, you
felt some deliverance upon his going away; for his whims and oddities could not fail to be sometimes a burden to you.”

That he was not, after all, free of the burden must have come as a profound shock to Hume when he called on Conway on May 15 to be handed Rousseau's letter. His surging frustration resounded through his missive to Mme de Boufflers the next day: “[Rousseau] has been guilty of an extravagance the most unaccountable and most blameable that is possible to be imagined.”

The exasperation is equally patent in the letter he tore off to Davenport: “It is very remarkable that in the same instant when Mr. Rousseau appears to you in so good humour, he represents himself to General Conway as overwhelmed with the deepest affliction on account of some most unexpected misfortune.” Even more remarkably, Rousseau had refused the king's bounty, though, Hume explodes, “He had allowed Mr. Conway to apply for it, had wrote to Lord Marischal to obtain his consent for accepting it, and had given me the authority to notify his consent to Mr. Conway; and though in all this he may seem to have used the king ill, and Mr. Conway and Lord Marischal, and me, above all, he makes no apology for this conduct and never writes me a word about it.”

In his first flush of anger, Hume had understood Rousseau as saying that he wanted to amend the pension's terms—in particular, to make it public. Preoccupied with government, Conway seems to have gone along with that construction. However, others who read the letter (including Adam Smith) recognized that this was a misreading. Rousseau made no suggestion of renegotiating the pension: he was merely attempting to explain why he felt unable to accept it at that moment.

Much would flow from this misconstruing. In his letter to Mme de Boufflers, Hume sounded ready to confront Rousseau: “I shall write to him, and tell him that the affair is no longer an object of deliberation. … Was anything in the world so unaccountable? For the
purposes of life and society, a little good sense is surely better than all this genius, and a little good humour than this extreme sensibility.” There could have been no clearer statement of the rational skeptic's inability to empathize with the man of sensibility. Philosophy had crossed over into life.

By the next day, however, Hume had cooled down. He tried to come to the rescue of his charge, writing that he and Conway hoped Rousseau would change his mind on the condition of the pension's secrecy. Conway and his wife surmised that the cause of Rousseau's profound melancholy was the King of Prussia letter, said Hume. If so, they wanted him to know that Mr. Walpole was very sorry to have given such offense. “That idle piece of pleasantry was meant to be entirely secret, and the publication of it was contrary to his intention and came from accident. Mr. Walpole has expressed the same sentiments to me.” Of course, all that was complete hogwash. In any case, from Rousseau there was no (immediate) response.

Bruised feelings aside, Hume was still convinced that Rousseau's prime concern was to renegotiate the terms of the pension with the king. So, on June 19, he wrote to Rousseau again. From Rousseau's silence, he deduced that Rousseau was still adamant over the secrecy stipulation. Therefore, he had approached Conway to see if the king would allow the pension to be made public. Conway would speak to the king if he were assured that Rousseau would accept and the king not be exposed to a humiliating second refusal. Would Rousseau give that consent as soon as possible?

But Hume's patience was wearing out. Although Rousseau could not have replied yet, Hume followed up on June 21 in formal terms, writing of himself in the third person and threatening to have nothing more to do with the pension. “Mr. Hume's compliments. He … begs as soon as convenient, an answer to his last, as he shall be obliged to leave London soon; and shall not then have it in his power to be any longer of service to him.”

This plea would have reached Wootton on June 23. Its impact was immediate. That same day, Rousseau wrote “the last letter you will receive from me.” In the words of one editor of Hume's correspondence, G. Birkbeck Hill, “In the midst of [Hume's] self-complacency, while he was, no doubt, flattering himself with the thought that he had attained the highest degree of merit which can be bestowed on any human creature, by possessing ‘the sentiment of benevolence in an eminent degree,' the fat good-humoured Epicurean of the North received, one day in June, a ruder shock than has perhaps ever tried a philosopher's philosophy.”

15

I
N THE LETTER
of June 23 that so amazed Hume, Rousseau's 341 words (in French) had a pitch of utter conviction and unanswerability. Rousseau had no further doubts about either Hume's conduct or the veracity of his own charges:

No ancient mariner holding a wedding guest with his glittering eye could have been more compelling.

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.

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.