Rousseau's Dog (31 page)

Rousseau's last thought in the
Confessions
was to record a statement he made after reading his work to a group of five aristocrats (whom he carefully names). He avowed to them the truth of what he had written. Anyone who challenged it was guilty of a lie or imposture. Anyone who examined his life and who could still believe him a dishonorable man deserved to be stifled. Thus, in the final act, the watchmaker's son from Geneva presents himself as justified in the high court of honor.

The title was surely a nod to Saint Augustine's
Confessions,
but in Rousseau's more subversive version, the truth about one's character and actions could be arrived at through introspection alone, and without needing any recourse to God.

The memoirs (“the history of my soul”) are still in print more than two centuries later, the text pored over by academics and biographers. Epochal claims are made for it—that it heralds the breakdown of the distinction between public and private, the dawn of our confessional era in which declaration of guilt itself becomes a virtue that helps cleanse the soul and diminish the offense, that it instigates a path of self-regard that ineluctably leads to the voluntary revelations of reality television shows, that it opens the way to particularism and the rejection of universal values, that it announces a radically new culture in which emotional truth is to be accorded a higher value than external evidence, that it is pioneering in its stress on the significance of childhood, both as a stage in our life of interest for its own sake, and for its impact on the formation of character.

This social and moral priority given to emotional honesty is crucial, though there is also a strong element of self-justification. Certainly there are dozens of factual inaccuracies in the
Confessions
—scholars
have established that Rousseau gets dates wrong and, on occasion, mixes up the chronology of events. On the whole, these particulars are trivial, though sometimes the error colors our judgment of an episode. For example, Rousseau says that he was first spanked at age eight, and the feeling of sensuality it gave him made him “desirous of experiencing it again.” In fact, he was eleven (with all the turmoil of approaching adolescence)—knowledge of which transforms our reading of the scene. In chronicling his early life, Rousseau often had little more to rely on than his memory; it is not surprising that he makes a few mistakes. It is far more surprising that he makes so few.

What caused such a furor—and distress to supporters such as Mme de Boufflers—was the book's brazen openness about the author and his cast of characters. While there is a line of autobiographies stretching back to Saint Augustine, one must remember that at the time there was still no established genre of literary autobiography. Though this was the great age of untrammeled biography, the word
autobiography
was not used until a
Monthly Review
article in 1797. The first person to proclaim the work's uniqueness was Jean-Jacques himself, and he did so on the very first line.

He wrote that he was going to expose his life to the world, “vile and despicable when my behaviour was such, as good, generous and noble when I was so.” And he was true to his word—the vile episodes he recounted included stealing, being sexually assaulted and visiting brothels, flashing at women in Turin (the latter presented as pathetically comic for the perpetrator). He also goes into the moral “crime” that many found unforgivable: the abandoning of his five children to the Paris foundling hospital.

The
Confessions
is not all excitement. Indeed, it took some self-absorption to imagine that the humdrum details of his life, his diurnal comings and goings, his friendships and feuds, his emotional highs and lows, would be of interest to anybody but himself.
The Monthly Review,
shortly after the
Confessions
was first published, barked that Rousseau was

Some passages are inescapably Pooterish, but Rousseau sees himself in these pages as not just a man; he represents humanity, in all its moral, emotional, and physical complexity. The unremitting wholeness of the portrait lifts the
Confessions
into a class of its own and sets the standard of revelation for generations to come. It contains flashes of brilliant illumination and insight. It can be tender, tragic, poignant, and poetic. There are moments of charged sensuality. There are moments of sheer joy. There is drama, there is gossip and bitchiness, there are times when Rousseau is brave, others when he is cowardly; times when he is embittered, others when he is generous. There are moments when it is unclear whether the reader is expected to laugh or cry. Thus, early on he describes the death of Mme de Vercellis, in whose household he worked. “At last, speaking no more, and already in the agonies of death, she broke wind loudly. ‘Good!' she said, turning round, ‘a woman who can fart is not dead!' These were the last words she uttered.” (Rousseau also recorded that she was a woman of ability and judgment “who died like a philosopher.”)

The unsparingly open Rousseau presented here does not exempt the reader from his nightmare world—one far removed from the soulful contemplation of tufted wood vetch and the delightful exchanges
with his
belle voisine.
In part two of the book, a thread of secret foes and plots lurking behind the mask of comradeship, a sense of gloom and foreboding, evoke a gothic mood in what is held out as honest recollection. In this world, the innocent narrator is helpless against the schemes of his adversaries, as in this extract from Book X, when he moved to Montmorency: “my heart clung still to attachments which gave my enemies countless holds on me; and the feeble rays that penetrated to my retreat served only to show me the darkness of the mysteries that were hidden from me.”

If Wootton presented the exile with the pastoral joy and peace of Arcadia, its rustic beauties did not ensure Rousseau a refuge from that darkness.

20

T
HE EXILES WERE
enduring a second cold spring in Staffordshire. The mists and incessant rain made Wootton Hall seem more cut off than ever. The two Englishmen to whom Rousseau was most attached, Davenport and Granville, were away. Granville had gone to Bath, Davenport was in London. Rousseau's
gouvernante
was increasingly restless. Not only was the damp air making her ill, life at Wootton for this Parisian former kitchen maid had become the torture of solitary confinement. This bleak isolation was reinforced by constant battles with the house servants. Le Vasseur claimed to have discovered Davenport's nonagenarian former nurse stirring cinders into their meals. She and the nurse continued to bicker (presumably with limited comprehension) from morning till night.

After the turn of the year, as winter lingered on, Rousseau made no secret of his yearning to leave. As early as February, he had conferred with Davenport about the sale of his library, and on March 12, with Davenport's help, he sold it en bloc to Vincent-Louis Dutens, an Anglican priest, an associate of Mme de Boufflers's, and an unusual figure in being a Frenchman who served occasionally in the British diplomatic service. In return, Dutens gave him an annuity often pounds.

In mid-March, Rousseau mulled over the possibility of removing to London or Chiswick. Le Vasseur's health might benefit. To Dutens he remarked that he would rather put himself at the mercy of all the devils in hell than that of English servants. In London or the suburbs, they could find a
pension
with an English-speaking French or Swiss domestic to run their errands. It was the only way to be sure of peace and independence.

In a letter to Davenport, Rousseau reminded his landlord that he had deprived him of his house for a year, thanked him effusively for his hospitality, and asked for his assistance in moving. The plan was to leave most of their effects and just take their “togs” in one small box for the coach; the main items would be safer at Wootton than being transported hither and thither.

Davenport was anxious that his guest not be abandoned. He offered another of his houses in Cheshire, Calvely (in his family since the fifteenth century), three times the size of Wootton, with cows and a large garden and in “remarkably soft air,” healthier for Le Vasseur. However, if Rousseau was set on going to London, he volunteered help to get him there and search for lodgings. But by the end of the month, he was again urging Rousseau and Le Vasseur to stay in the country. “I wish to God you would let me send her along with you to Calvely.” Rousseau declined. He wanted his own household. As for Le Vasseur, she was still deteriorating (it was not surprising given her sad existence). She hoped in London there would be people to talk to. Her request was perfectly reasonable; after all, she had left family and friends to be at his side.

Davenport had also asked his tenant's permission to revive the question of a royal pension. Rousseau agreed: if the favor came only from the king and his ministers, he would accept at once. He would implacably reject it if it were owed to the solicitations of anyone else. He was never to discover that when Davenport approached Conway, Conway consulted Hume. The Scot endorsed the idea, or, in his words to Blair, he had “exhorted [Conway] to do so charitable an action.”

Conway arranged the pension even though he was entangled in the low politics of Chatham's administration, moderating American policy, and negotiating over proposals for a parliamentary inquiry into the East India Company (and the regulation of its income). He officially informed Davenport of the king's approval for a pension of £100 per annum on March 18, 1767 (by which point Davenport had braved Rousseau's wrath by telling him that Hume had been appointed undersecretary to Conway).

In making his recommendation to the noble Conway,
le bon David
had had to rise above his feelings about Rousseau, though rancor still permeates his own account of the episode. While exaggerating his part in the regranting of the pension, he relayed to friends (wrongly) that “the King was very much prejudiced against Rousseau,” and that Rousseau's change of mind proved the “suspicion which I always entertained” that he thought he had sufficient interest to obtain the pension by himself, and “that he only picked a quarrel with me in order to
free himself from the humiliating burden of gratitude towards me. His motives, therefore, were much blacker than many seem to apprehend them.”

Hume was presumably unaware that in January the then prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, had remitted the duty on Rousseau's books from France and, as Davenport reported to his tenant, “has ordered this to be done immediately & he wishes that it may be represented to Mr. Rousseau as a compliment intended by the King in showing him this little mark of DISTINCTION.”

I
N PASSING ON
the news about the pension, Davenport judged it wise to gloss over Hume's role. He told Rousseau that the pension came only from the king himself and his immediate ministers.

He judged well. His tenant had certainly not put the Hume “plot” behind him: a February note to Brooke Boothby refers to “the treachery of M. Hume” and “his secret intrigues.” He asked Boothby, who was in Marseille, to send “a small twig of an olive tree with the flower well preserved in a book: this would give me great pleasure, if only because of the augury.” An augury of what? Did Rousseau imagine himself in a Gethsemane?

He still pined for authentic friendship as he defined it, mourning the rupture with Earl Marischal, behind which he detected the maneuverings of both
le bon David
and the son of the
jongleur
(Tronchin). In mid-March, he complained to Marischal that the earl had never specified Rousseau's wrongdoing. In any case, the accused man was not the real Rousseau, he said. Someone had given a phantom his name.