Rousseau's Dog (25 page)

According to Amélie Suard, the wife of Hume's French translator, she and her husband were at Mme Necker's salon when someone bustled in from d'Holbach's and reported that d'Holbach had just received a letter from Hume which began with the words: “My dear baron, Rousseau is a scoundrel.”

Hume retracted all the decent things he had ever said about Rousseau. He regretted keenly ever having taken an interest in the ex-citizen of Geneva, because he had indeed nursed a viper in his bosom. (Just as d'Holbach had warned him.) He rehearsed all the efforts he had
made to gain a pension for the exile and fulminated that Rousseau's snub was simply a declaration of war and the first signal of a campaign designed to dishonor
him.
What is more, he had proof that Rousseau must have planned this campaign for two months. His strategy was to let Hume pursue the pension on a verbal assent and then summarily and ostentatiously to refuse it. Rousseau would thus ingratiate himself with the opposition parties while compromising Hume with the king and the people. (Hume could have had no grounds at all for this: there was no evidence of Rousseau's interest in the machinations of London politics.)

A letter to Hume from one of his admirers and translators, Mme de Meinières, on July 7, is suffused with the same bewilderment and shock with which Hume's anguished tidings were received in Paris. No one doubted that Rousseau was ungrateful, wild, capricious, vain. But, and here she quoted Hume directly, that he was the
blackest and most atrocious villain that ever disgraced human nature,
and that one could lavish on him the descriptions
of the lying, the ferocity, of the rascal
—that was new.

Notably, Hume had shared his rage and distress with his French contacts before any other. Notably, too, he selected d'Holbach, unyieldingly antagonistic to Rousseau, rather than his passionate devotee Mme de Boufflers, who was also a Rousseau supporter and whom Hume was allowing to continue under the illusion that he intended to return to Paris to live in the apartment she had arranged for him in the Temple. (As “grand priest to the idol of the Temple,” sniffed Mme du Deffand.)

However, the Scotsman was in a stew of anxiety for his reputation in Britain, too. On the first day of July, he wrote to Professor Blair “earnestly desiring” him not to show anyone the letters he had sent him about Rousseau and to retrieve any copies. Indeed, how embarrassing their so recent encomiums must have seemed when the subject had been revealed as “surely the blackest and most atrocious villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world and I am heartily ashamed of
anything I ever wrote in his favour.” There is the first glimpse of Hume's intentions and his awareness of the related perils: “I know you will pity me when I tell you that I am afraid I must publish this to the whole world in a pamphlet which must contain an account of the whole affair between us. … You know how dangerous any controversy on a disputable point would be with a man of his talents.”

The idea of putting his side of the affair into the public domain continued to germinate. Thanks to Hume's circle, Rousseau's
démarche
was instantly the talk of
le tout Paris.
In one of his letters to d'Holbach, the contents of which were relayed around town, Hume spoke of a pamphlet to instruct the public in all Rousseau's “atrocities.”

O
N BOTH SIDES
of the Channel, Hume's flabbergasted friends now rallied to his support, all compassion on his abused philanthropy but all caution on publication. On July 6, Julie de L'Espinasse and d'Alembert wrote a joint letter, indicative of how eager they were to be involved. De L'Espinasse began: “What atrocities has [Rousseau] committed against you?” They had heard something about it from the baron. She asked for a summary of Hume's reply to these atrocities—not out of curiosity or doubt but to be ready to defend him against Rousseau fanatics, many of whom were held in high public esteem. She surrendered the pen to an impatient d'Alembert. What had gone on? He, too, desperately wanted to be better informed so that he could persuade people of what he was already persuaded, that Rousseau had truly wronged Hume. However, he counseled Hume to think twice before subjecting his woes to public scrutiny: these sorts of quarrels only encouraged the zealots and gave the indifferent an excuse to blackguard men of letters.

Adam Smith adopted the same line, introducing a note of political realism. He also wrote from Paris (where he was enjoying the grand tour as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch). “I am thoroughly convinced that Rousseau is as great a rascal as you & as every man here believe
him to be; yet let me beg of you not to think of publishing any thing to the world upon the very great impertinence which he has been guilty of to you.” By refusing the pension, Rousseau might have exposed Hume to some ridicule in the eyes of the Court and Ministry; however, said Smith, within three weeks
le bon David
would again be recognized as the man of honor he was.

On July 7, the original recipient of Hume's distress (and the man who had assured it maximum publicity), d'Holbach, finally replied in person, sympathetic over Hume's plight but joining with the others in trying to temper the broiling emotions of the exemplar of moderation.

He pointed out that Hume was not used to this mischief making. Readers of Hume's
History
expected more history to come, not pamphlets to correct the incorrigible. Now that the dust had settled a bit, no doubt Hume would agree with the baron, and all with whom he had shared the news, that he should avoid an endless literary dogfight. He must not be embarrassed at having been duped through his goodness of heart. He should leave polemic to those who had no better way of passing the time. His French friends had let well alone when attacked by Rousseau. Hume would come to share this judgment when his serenity returned. He should remember that he was David Hume: his name was known and respected, and no one could injure it. However, if in spite of their guidance he did decide to publish something, he should send it to Mr. Suard at the
Gazette de France.

D'Holbach also answered a query. Hume, pursuing his investigations into Rousseau's resources and seemingly intent on demonstrating that the exile was not as poor as he claimed, had asked the baron to verify that Rousseau had received several thousand francs from the Maréchal de Luxembourg. D'Holbach reported back that he had heard from a friend of the banker Rougemont's how money was sent to Rousseau in Môtiers through the Marshal de Luxembourg's
valet de chambre,
the confidential servant La Roche. Once, La Roche had handed over 10,000
louis, about the sum Hume had mentioned
[authors' italics].

S
ECLUDED IN WOOTTON,
the alleged recipient of the ten thousand
louis
had also been occupying himself with the affair. On July 10, he sent Hume the detailed case his mortified patron had insisted upon so ill advisedly.

The exile began by explaining that he was sick and in no condition to write. However, Hume wanted an explanation and so must have it. Then Rousseau unrolled the indictment in sixty-three lengthy paragraphs. Of course, he had already laid the foundations in his letter to Mme de Verdelin, but he must have taken pains to compose this philippic, its elegantly written final version belies the roughest of rough drafts.

At the commencement, he promoted the idea of himself as a man apart, implying that he was not involved in the quotidian politicking of Hume's life. His world was one of feeling, of self-knowledge, a world that enabled him to rise above the need for legal proof of his allegations. From that basis, he could answer Hume's confident demand for the name of his accuser. “That accuser, sir, is the only man in the world whose testimony I should admit against you: it is yourself.”

He began at the beginning, with his quitting Switzerland. The narrative then followed the general course mapped out to Mme de Verdelin, with the stylistic quirk that Rousseau treated Hume in the third person throughout. “I received a letter from Mr. Hume.” “I went to Paris to join Mr. Hume.” Possibly Rousseau envisaged sending the letter to others, perhaps Conway, but this literary device was a powerful one, severing their relationship while putting Hume at arm's length from the reader as well as from Rousseau himself.

The structure is also conceived with a novelist's eye for drama. The episode of Hume's “four terrifying words” (on their journey to England) is alluded to midway, though out of its chronological order, but the words are not spelled out until almost the end, when they can be deployed against Hume to devastating effect.
Je tiens J.J. Rousseau
becomes successively the capstone of the author's argument, his petrifying nightly visitation, and his instrument of emotionally charged repetition:

Rousseau also brought a fine craftsmanship to a dramatized mockery of his victim. He records how he metaphorically “slapped” his patron's face three times, but Hume did not feel it. Contemporaries thought this pillorying of Hume inspired, executed with the lightest of touches. Jean-François Marmontel, the popular author of novels, plays, and verse, praised the “sublime insolence” of “this trick of raillery.”

He first “slapped” Hume's face, Rousseau recorded, when he failed to write to his benefactor after the King of Prussia letter was published in London—in adversity, he had turned elsewhere. The second slap came with Rousseau's assertion (in his April 7 letter to the
St. James's Chronicle
) that the spoof's author in Paris “had an accomplice in London and that was what rendered his heart.” This had to mean Hume, but his protector pretended to believe that the only cause of Rousseau's distress over the spoof was his vanity. “Vain or not, I was mortally afflicted; he knew it and wrote not a word.” The third slap was delivered when Rousseau replied directly to Conway over the pension, not rejecting it but excusing himself for the present, and not to Hume, who had undertaken the negotiations. “Third blow on the cheek of my patron, and if he does not feel it, that is assuredly his fault. He feels nothing.”

In concluding the long indictment, Rousseau framed a peroration in which he contemplated the possibility that he, not Hume, was in the
wrong. It is easy to hear this powerful appeal being spoken to judge and jury.

It is unsurprising that such prose scared Hume. Hume's own written style has a beautiful lucidity; it is never meretricious, and his theoretical writings are scattered with plain and unpretentious illustrations. (Samuel Johnson condemned Hume for reveling in reasonableness: “He had a vanity in being thought easy,” he said to Boswell.) Narrating history, the Scot had a facility both for engaging his readers' sympathies and for creating comedy. But he could never match Rousseau's rhetorical force, poetic gifts, and sense of theater.

Taking the indictment as a whole, the effect is gothic, as hidden enemies cynically plot the fall of the innocent, and seemingly harmless actions carry a subterranean danger. When digesting it, Hume might have laughed over the contortions the plot demanded and wept over his erstwhile friend's torments. He might have chosen to dismiss Rousseau as either a lunatic or an imbecile, recalling John Locke's distinction between the reasoning of a madman and a fool: the fool reasons incorrectly on correct premises, while a madman reasons correctly on absurd premises. Instead, what he did was furiously to annotate Rousseau's allegations, discovering “twelve lyes” to be communicated to the public in his preemptive campaign to shield himself from the eloquence of the most powerful writer in Europe.

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