Rousseau's Dog (30 page)

Alone and in Arcadia, as the description of Wootton Hall he had sent to Mme de Luze on arrival made clear:

During fine weather, he could wander for miles in the limestone hills, following the course of the river Dove, through water meadows
and by its sharp gorges and cascades. It was (and is still) one of the loveliest parts of Britain, rich in hazel and hawthorn, birch and osier. In summer, honeysuckle and wild roses sweeten the air. The steep-sided valleys—the dales—are carpeted with ash woods or bare to the skies with scrub or grassland. Perhaps, in his wanderings, Rousseau added to the richness of the flora. He was a collector of plants: an early-nineteenth-century guide to the region makes a claim that “the fickle and whimsical Rousseau” sowed “the seeds of some curious foreign flowers in the neighbourhood.”

Rousseau was in two simultaneous worlds. In one, he was exposed to betrayal and conspiracy and trailed by the companion seen by Grimm, the second dog “who will not suffer him to rest in peace.” Safe within his other world, he was living the life he had long sought, a blissful existence in nature, away from the impurity, the competitiveness, the triviality, the lack of authenticity of the city that he always characterized by black vapors.

On most of Rousseau's walks, to his evident pleasure, he was unlikely to encounter another living soul. In any case, were he to, he could retreat behind a language barrier. The minister from Ellaston village stopped by early on to welcome the exile, and Rousseau reported to Hume, with apparent glee, the meeting's discomforting silence. “Seeing that I would speak only French to him, he did not wish to talk to me in English, so that the interview passed with almost not a word spoken.” Even if he learned English, Rousseau told Hume, he would still speak only French to local people who knew nothing of the language. (In fact, he seemed to have a good passive knowledge, reading letters written to him in English by Hume and Davenport.) So far as Davenport's servants were concerned, “Mlle Le Vasseur serves me as interpreter, and her fingers speak better than my tongue.”

A number of legends grew up around Rousseau's limited contact with country folk. Local lore had it that some mistook him for a king driven from his realm. It was said that he wandered at night over the Weaver Hills (“when the fairies were out”). Nearby, at Stanton, was a
lead mine, and Rousseau is thought to have made the acquaintance of workers there: his accounts show him donating money to the lead miners in August 1766, an intriguing action, given his ambiguous attitude to accepting gifts from others.

In 1840, the social historian William Howitt went to Wootton in search of memories of Rousseau and in
Visits to Remarkable Places
documented the clear recollections from some of the oldest inhabitants of the area, transcribing their strong Staffordshire accent.

Howitt gives the only evidence of Le Vasseur speaking English. Davenport's housekeeper was beaten by her husband and the outcry brought some villagers running up. “Madam Zell in a state of great excitement said in her few words of English to some young women,—'Never marry! Never marry! You see! You see!'”

Another of his stories has it that when Rousseau was out one day, a man approached him to inquire if he was a botanist. This was Erasmus Darwin, physician, scientist, educationist, standard-bearer for the industrial revolution, and leading member of the pathfinding Lunar Society of enlightened scientific thinkers (also grandfather of Charles). Apparently, Darwin had learned when Rousseau was due to pass a particular spot. Immediately recognizing that the encounter was not by chance, Rousseau was so wary that Darwin never came near him again.

AWAY FROM THE
world of betrayal and conspiracy, Rousseau's life was one of playfulness, sociability, and charm. Intimacy with Hume had been out of the question, but Rousseau could relax with a Woottoon
neighbor, a stiff, reticent, and, it seems, endearingly grumpy sixty-seven-year-old. The relationship between Bernard Granville and the fiery Genevan was both touching and incongruous, though (initially) Rousseau regarded it as purely superficial. “I talk merely about inconsequential things with the only neighbour with whom I converse—because he's the only one who speaks French.”

Granville lived some two miles from Wootton Hall at Calwich Abbey, which he had purchased four decades earlier. The mansion was in a valley with the river Dove only two hundred yards away and the grounds were constantly flooded.

A man of substantial means, Granville dedicated time and money to improving his gardens; he put in a lake, for example, with a wooded island in its center connected to the bank by a pretty little bridge. At the front of the house was a bowling green. According to Granville's younger sister, Mrs. Mary Delany, the estate was “said to out-do any of the wonders of the Peak.”

Shared with Rousseau, Granville's other passion was music. In a room dedicated to music, he had an organ that had been chosen for him by the composer George Frideric Handel, a neighbor of Mary Delany's in London.

Of Mary Delany, Edmund Burke said, “she was the truly great woman of fashion, not only of the present, but of all ages.” Then sixty-six, she still retained her irrepressible vitality, her bright eyes, and her wave of curly hair. She had the reputation for being deeply spiritual as well as cultured and artistic. George III and Queen Charlotte welcomed her at court.

Rousseau was introduced to Granville's wider family. Of his nieces and nephews, Granville's favorite was another Mary, born in 1746. This Mary was a frequent visitor to Calwich, especially after the death of her mother, Granville's sister Anne Dewes, in 1761. She had been given a traditional upbringing, learning dance, deportment, lacework, and
French—she was confident enough to write to Rousseau in his own language.

Rousseau obviously warmed to Mary, in an avuncular way, addressing her in letters as his
belle voisine,
his lovely neighbor. The (rather childish) twenty-year-old appears to have taken in her stride the attention paid her by her uncle's unlikely neighbor, the international celebrity. On one occasion, she embroidered a collar for Sultan, receiving in return a gallant and comical note of thanks.

Although Rousseau treated her with nothing more than affection, his mere proximity was enough to make Mrs. Delany apprehensive. She was not familiar with Rousseau's oeuvre, as “I avoid engaging in books from whose subtlety I might perhaps receive some prejudice,” but she was uneasy about Rousseau's influence. “Now for a word about Monsieur Rousseau, who has gained so much of your admiration. His writings are ingenious, no doubt, and were they weeded from the false and erroneous sentiments that are blended through his works (as I have been told), they would be as valuable as they are entertaining.”

Mrs. Delany then played a role in successfully dissuading a wealthy Irish landowner, the Marchioness of Kildare, from approaching Rousseau. Although the marchioness, too, had not read
Émile,
she was of the opinion, until Mrs. Delany convinced her otherwise, that the educational innovator might be the perfect tutor for her eldest son.

In winter, apart from Rousseau, Calwich had few visitors. But from June there was an endless stream of guests who came for the vistas, the
vigorous walks, the clean air, and to admire Granville's landscaping. They included Brooke Boothby from Ashbourne and Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the duchess of Portland.

The duchess was an intimate friend of Mary Delany's and was another remarkable woman. Widow of the second Duke of Portland, she combined a sharp intellect with an obsession for collecting that extended from objets d'art to natural history, from the Portland Vase to seashells (she was a serial snail slayer; a thousand died at her fair hands). But her true zeal was for botany, and she was acquainted with all the prominent botanists of the day.

If the duchess had heard the talk in London society of Rousseau's maligning Hume's name, it seems not to have made an impression on her. Rousseau appeared to be a normal, if strangely dressed, enthusiast for botany. She went with him into the Peak District on an expedition, and from that time on Rousseau occasionally puffed himself as
herboriste de la duchesse de Portland.
They flattered each other in correspondence, and the duchess sent her Swiss acquaintance seeds and plants—including, in August 1766, some “great tufted wood vetch [found] growing upon a high bank.” He thanked her, on September 3, 1766: “If I had not had any love of botany, the plants M. Granville has sent me from you would have given it to me.” The natural world suffused his soul with a “precious serenity.” Botany was conducive to wisdom and virtue, “chaining the passions with bonds of flowers.” The duchess was charmed by the grace of expression.

B
ACK AT
W
OOTTON
Hall there were few distractions, and to those who met him, Rousseau seemed in high spirits. Davenport put in occasional appearances, and Rousseau assisted him in clearing and cutting back the woods. Once or twice he showed up with his granddaughter Phoebe, of whom he was very fond, and grandson Davies. Davenport
and Rousseau played chess, though the old gentleman could not put up much resistance. Rousseau engaged in good-natured banter, pretending Davenport lost to him intentionally.

During August, Rousseau and Le Vasseur visited Davenport at Davenport Hall in Cheshire. Brooke Boothby dropped in at Wootton now and again, visits that meant so much to him that in his portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, he is holding a volume of Rousseau. Only in his mid-twenties, he had been at a military academy in Caen and so was fluent in French.

However, the sole regular, day-to-day company was provided by Davenport's servants, with whom Rousseau delighted in not being able to communicate. Taking care of his and his
gouvernante's
needs were the steward Benjamin Walton, John Cowper and his housekeeper wife, and the watchman Samuel Finney. There was also Davenport's near-blind, nonagenarian former nurse; she and Le Vasseur quarreled incessantly.

B
ESIDES HIS BOTANY,
the local social life, and his countermeasures against plotters out to destroy him, what else was there to keep the fugitive occupied?

He continued to take an active interest in Genevan politics, siding with the
Représentants,
the Party of Liberty as he called them, who were pushing to extend rights and prosperity among the population. Their opponents condemned this struggle as a threat to the city's unity. France backed the existing political settlement—in effect, the oligarchy—and put the city under an increasingly tight blockade. From Wootton, Rousseau sent moral and financial support to its beleaguered citizens. In January 1767, he wrote to François-Henri d'Ivernois praising the
Représentants,
comparing their valor to the courage displayed by Roman senators about to be killed by Gauls.

However, once he had adapted to Staffordshire, Rousseau reverted to what he knew best, the pen, although he had chided Mme de Boufflers for her stress on his continuing to work. Davenport relayed to Hume that he found his tenant “busy writing; and it should be some large affair, from the quantity of paper he bought.” (News Hume greeted with terror.)

After the weather improved, a favorite haunt was in the shade under a stand of trees known as Twenty Oaks, not far from Wootton Hall. Another choice nook was a small, U-shaped grotto, about six square meters in size, situated adjacent to the main house, and built into the solid, sandstone rock. Even Rousseau, slight as he was, would have had to squeeze through the low, narrow, wooden doorway. Inside were a stone seat, a fireplace in the corner, and a small, open window looking out onto a passageway leading to the basement of the main building. Here Rousseau composed a major section of a book accepted today as a landmark in literature. We could say of it what Rousseau's biographer John Morley said of
On the Social Contract:
it ranked in history as an act, not a book.

“I wrote the first part,” says Rousseau, “with pleasure and gratification, and at my ease.” And indeed, the opening half of his autobiography, the
Confessions,
is full of sunny vignettes and happy reminiscences, though, as we have seen, his early life had its share of hurt, even torment, which he picked over in masochistic detail. “All the memories which I had to recall were for me so many fresh enjoyments. I turned back to them incessantly with renewed pleasure, and I was able to revise my descriptions until I was satisfied with them, without feeling in the least bored.”

Rousseau began the
Confessions
well before coming to Wootton, and completed them well after he had left, in 1770. But he labored over much of part one of the book while he was in England. That part, which conducts the reader through his life up to his going to Paris in 1742, contains six “books,” or chapters, as does the notably darker part
two. So feared by Hume, the autobiography stops abruptly just short of Rousseau's setting out for Strasbourg. The next stage of his life was reserved for part three, never to be written (although in part one he does refer to a visit made “a few days ago” to Davenport, where something occurred to remind him of learning arithmetic as a child).