Rousseau's Dog (2 page)

Rousseau was not a robust boy: he had an embarrassing and painful complaint that would torment him all his life—a congenital malformation of his urinary tract. He passed water slowly and with difficulty, while his bladder felt as if it was only half emptying its contents.

Aged ten, having lost his mother, the child lost his father: Isaac quarreled with a French captain who thereupon accused him of drawing his sword in the city, a crime under Genevan law. Rather than go to prison, his father chose to exile himself from Geneva. Rousseau was taken in by his uncle, who sent him and his own son, Rousseau's cousin Bernard, to stay in the country with a pastor who taught them Latin. Later, Rousseau recalled a time of bucolic bliss and commented on a theme that would forever preoccupy him, friendship. “The simplicity of this rural existence brought me one invaluable benefit; it opened my heart to friendship.” He also discovered a sexual proclivity at the hands of the pastor's sister. When he was naughty, she beat him. But this only aroused him sexually and he could not wait to offend again.

G
ENEVA WAS A
small, walled city-state of just over twenty thousand inhabitants, secured by mountainous frontiers. Doubly cut off from its environs, yet still threatened by the powerful surrounding Catholic monarchies, Geneva retained a distinctive culture and ambience,
colored particularly by Calvinism. Calvin had written its constitution in 1541, designing it to bring about his godly vision. Rousseau always took pride in calling himself a “Citizen of Geneva” (his friends wrote to him as “Dear Citizen”) and his growing up there molded his thinking, particularly about politics, democratic participation, and individual responsibility.

Then, on Sunday, March 14, 1728, Rousseau suffered his third wrenching separation and bade his childhood a definitive farewell. By this time, he was back in the city as a sixteen-year-old apprentice to an engraver. While walking with some comrades outside the walls, he heard the distant signal announcing the evening locking of the gates. Running desperately toward them, he saw the first drawbridge rising when he was only twenty paces away. He had already been punished twice for being caught beyond the walls, and now he determined not to return to his master and to leave Geneva altogether. His cousin Bernard came out of the city to supply him with a few presents for his journey, including a small sword. In the first of his conjectured plots, Rousseau suspected that his uncle and aunt had entrusted Bernard with the gifts to rid themselves of their troublesome nephew rather than urge his homecoming. He walked off in the direction of Savoy.

One week later, in Annecy, he received an introduction to a woman who would have a decisive impact on his life. Mme de Warens, just under thirty, and with “a ravishing complexion,” was a Swiss baroness and Catholic convert. Her principal hobby is said to have been rescuing Protestant souls, particularly those lodged in the bodies of handsome young men. She took in the homeless boy, and within five years she and her charge were lovers. In the meantime, on the advice of a priest, she dispatched Rousseau to Turin, where he embraced Catholicism and spent a short period at a religious hospice (in which he was subjected to unwanted male sexual attention, narrated in physical detail in the
Confessions
), and worked as a domestic valet.

He remained with Mme de Warens—the woman he would always refer to as “mamma,” while she nicknamed him “little one”—on and off
until April 1740. Then, following his return from a trip, he discovered that she had taken up with another young blood, the son of a local high official. (According to Rousseau, “a tall, pale, silly youth, tolerably well built with a face as dull as his wits.”) It must have felt like another betrayal.

This precipitated a move to Lyon, where Rousseau would encounter his first
philosophe
—the label given to the prime instigators of the French Enlightenment. The
philosophes,
a group of scientists, artists, writers, and statesmen, believed in the construction of a rational order and in truth arrived at through reason. Holding received ideas up to critical scrutiny, they were skeptical of tradition and authority, particularly religious authority. They saw themselves as part of a loose, yet nonetheless unified, cosmopolitan culture of progress. In Lyon, Rousseau took the post of tutor to the children of the city's chief provost, M. de Mably. Two of de Mably's brothers were
philosophes,
and the family gave Rousseau vital introductions for the next stage of his career.

A constant in that career would be music, a vocation to which Rousseau devoted much of his spare time. He was accomplished in several instruments, including the flute and the violin. He said of himself, “J.J. was born for music.” Throughout his life, he was to earn an income as a music copyist, and he also nursed ambitions to become a composer. In Lyon, beside teaching (and pilfering his employer's wine and bread), he began to construct a radical new system for musical notation, the fundamental idea being to substitute numbers for visual signs.

Then, in 1741, armed with his newly acquired contacts, his notation project, and a theatrical comedy, he was ready to seek his fame and fortune in the capital of culture.

F
AME, COMBINED WITH
a moderate fortune, was indeed to follow, but not yet. For the moment, Paris dismissed the young Genevan as an inarticulate provincial; the musical authorities scornfully rejected his notation.

While he watched his money run out, Rousseau tried his hand at both drama and ballet, and whiled the empty hours away at a café, where he battled at chess against the dazzling player and fellow composer François-André Philidor. He also fell into conversation with a young man of much the same age and circumstances, Denis Diderot.

Diderot had come to Paris with high literary aspirations, and the energy and talent to match. A born controversialist, ebullient, free-thinking, subversive, he would publish a cascade of political, philosophical, and scientific works, as well as novels and plays. But he is most renowned for being one of the founding editors of the
Encyclopédie,
to which he devoted twenty-five years of his life. This gargantuan project required thousands upon thousands of entries and illustrations for an enterprise that called on all the foremost thinkers of the day. Exemplifying and focusing the French Enlightenment, the
Encyclopédie
was intended not merely to document and disseminate knowledge, but also to act as a stimulus to political and social debate. Rousseau earned some money writing the musical entries for the
Encyclopédie
—over two hundred of them in all—though he was also responsible for one of the most prominent political articles,
Économie politique,
presaging his later critique of property.

F
OR ALL THAT
activity, Rousseau had really been marking time for eight years before his life reached its turning point in 1749.

He was on his way to Vincennes prison to see Diderot. His friend had been locked up under a
lettre de cachet,
the notorious royal warrant for imprisonment without legal process, for
Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See,
containing what the censors deemed impious, atheistic views. With publication of the first volume of the
Encyclopédie
imminent, Diderot was in dire need of company to bolster his spirits; his dearest friend (of the moment), Rousseau, was the most regular of visitors, going every other day. “I was certainly the one who had most
sympathy for his sufferings. I thought I should also be the one whose presence would be the most consoling.”

Vincennes was six miles from Paris, and the impoverished Rousseau walked there through the heat and dust of summer. On one occasion, pausing under a roadside tree, he began flipping through the literary journal he had brought along. In it, there was a notice of an essay competition from the Académie de Dijon. The question was: “Has the progress of the sciences or the arts done more to corrupt or improve morals?” Rousseau had a revelation: “From the moment I read those words, I beheld another universe and became another man.” By the time he reached Vincennes, he “was in a state of agitation bordering upon madness.”

His enemies would say it was a state from which he would never fully depart—and Rousseau would not disagree. “From that moment I was lost. All the rest of my life and my misfortunes followed inevitably as a result of that moment's madness.”

He worked feverishly, wrestling with his thoughts during sleepless nights, then scribbling them down in the morning, as would become his habit. The result, in which he provocatively railed against the corrupting influence of civilization, won first prize (a gold medal valued at three hundred
livres
). Published as
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts,
it caused a national sensation. From being a thirty-eight-year-old failed musician and dramatist, overnight he was now feted by the coterie of Parisian intellectuals in “the Republic of Letters”—the sobriquet given to the private world of wit, debate, literature, and philosophical inquiry, the salon, a world existing in parallel with the stultifying traditional culture of the royal court.

Although his ideas evolved and mutated over the next two decades, Rousseau established his blueprint with this puncturing of the Enlightenment notion of human development: compared with the past, we were less free, less equal, less content, less sincere, more dependent, more alienated, more self-obsessed, more suspicious. It is impossible to exaggerate the seismic shock this caused at a time when thinkers
had an axiomatic confidence in progress. Many regarded Rousseau's reflections as perverse. Others appeared to relish being at the receiving end of a philosophical flagellation. Diderot was tireless in promoting Rousseau's brilliant polemic, though it contradicted many of his own ideas, and in essence mocked his worldly aspirations.

R
OUSSEAU'S PERSONAL LIFE
was also in transformation. Around 1745, he had entered upon the one close relationship that would endure until his death. Twenty-year-old Thérèse Le Vasseur waited on table in the hotel where Rousseau lodged, near the Sorbonne. An uneducated skivvy, a kitchen and laundry maid, she was the sole support of her unemployed and bankrupt parents. Rousseau was immediately struck by her “modest behaviour” and “lively and gentle looks.” He believed that he saw in her a girl with honest feelings, “a simple girl without coquetry.” “Thanks to her, I lived happily, as far as the course of events permitted.” He declared to Thérèse that he would never forsake her, but that he would never marry her. Although beneath him in the social order, she was far closer to him in class than the refined denizens of the capital's gilded drawing rooms, to which he would soon gain easy access but in which he would never feel at ease.

The first of their five children was born the following year. All five would be abandoned at the Foundling Hospital in Paris. Baldly stated, this sounds inexcusably callous, though at a time when the arrival of a child could spell disaster, the practice was not regarded as heinous. For the vast majority of its 600,000 inhabitants, the capital was a foul and grisly pit: sewage flowed in the alleys and lanes down to the river where drinking water was drawn. Rousseau recalled his initial impression of the capital in the
Confessions.
“I saw nothing but dirty and stinking little streets, ugly black houses, a general air of slovenliness and poverty, beggars, carters, menders of old clothes, criers of decoctions and old hats.” Life was a struggle for survival against smallpox and venereal disease. With some 30,000 practitioners, prostitution was a major
industry. In 1750 alone, 3,785 children were deposited at L'Hospice des Enfants-Trouvés. There was not much hope for them: most died before their first birthday. Rousseau confesses to having had to use all his rhetorical powers to persuade Mlle Le Vasseur into letting her children go. Because marriage was out of the question, it was “the sole means of saving her honor.” However, he and Le Vasseur were in a full-time relationship, and that he did not even note down his abandoned children's admission numbers is revealing. He never escaped the charge of inhumanity.

I
N 1752, THE
forty-year-old Rousseau triumphed again, and in the most prominent of venues. His opera
Le Devin du village
(The Village Soothsayer) was performed before Louis XV in the court at Fontaine-bleau, and the king loved it. In his private apartments, he sang the songs and hummed the music. Rousseau, who had watched the opera in his working clothes, with a rough beard and uncombed wig, was nonetheless summoned to an audience with the king. Terrified that his bladder would let him down, he fled back to Paris. Louis would even have bestowed a pension on Rousseau had he not deserted the scene hotfoot. Diderot rebuked him for forfeiting the income and not thinking more of Le Vasseur and her mother. Rousseau agonized that in pocketing the king's sous, he would inevitably have been compromised: “I should have to flatter or be silent. … Farewell, truth, liberty, and courage!”

I
N
1754, R
OUSSEAU
returned to Geneva for four months, reconverted to Calvinism, and reclaimed his citizenship. He was now toiling over a second competition essay for the Dijon Academy. Dedicated to the city of Geneva, Rousseau's discourse,
On the Origins of Inequality Among Men,
was completed in May. It is perhaps his most radical work, highlighting the gap between the rich and powerful, on the one hand, and
the poor and weak, on the other, and the spurious attempts that were made to rationalize the disparities. Humans, thought Rousseau, were mired in a condition of servitude, though they had originally been free, and he offered a historical sketch of how this tragic state of affairs had come about, stressing the creation and pernicious impact of private property. He did not win the prize, but the essay boosted his reputation further. He sent a copy to François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, who responded with a double-edged thanks, precipitating a relatively civil, if cool, exchange of letters. “I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race. … Never has so much intelligence been deployed in an effort to make us beasts.”