Rousseau's Dog (5 page)

In Paris, Rousseau's departure from the capital was derided and there were confident predictions of his speedy return. But for Rousseau, the adjustment from town to country signaled a self-conscious sloughing off of his Parisian skin, a bid for independence and authenticity, and a denial of the
philosophes
' approach to life that privileged reason above feeling. He was convinced that the seething immorality of the big city had dripped poison into his spirit. Following this escape, “I recovered my own true nature.”

His own true nature was ready to embrace Nature itself. The atmosphere in Paris had become abhorrent to him. The triumph of his opera, he mused in the
Confessions,
“sowed the seed of those secret jealousies
which did not break out till long afterwards.” Even by 1756, he observed in literary men, including Grimm and Diderot, a distinct absence of their previous cordiality. When he was invited to the soirées given by the richest member of the
philosophe
circle, Baron Thiry d'Holbach, the other guests, regular members of the baron's coterie, whispered in one another's ears while Rousseau was ignored. Later, in 1757, when Diderot composed a play,
The Natural Son,
he included a line which Rousseau
knew
was aimed at him: “The good man lives in society; only a wicked man lives alone.” He was deeply hurt.

Rousseau had entered a period of psychological transformation that he recorded in exalted terms. In the
Confessions,
he portrayed himself as having become intoxicated with virtue: an intoxication which started in his head but flowed to his heart. It “was the origin of my sudden eloquence, and of the truly celestial fire that burned in me and spread to my early books.” He also experienced a surge in confidence in his dealings with others. The effect of these changes on Rousseau can be seen in his 1758
Letter to d'Alembert on the Theater
—a clash with Jean-Baptiste Le Rond d'Alembert that involved both Diderot and Voltaire. D'Alembert, Diderot's coeditor on the
Encyclopédie,
was a pioneering mathematician and theoretical astronomer, a sparkling conversationalist and talented mimic. He was generally held to have a lovable character, free of extreme passions—except for his invincible ambition.

Following an excursion to Geneva, in the course of which he visited Voltaire, d'Alembert wrote an article on the city for the
Encyclopédie.
Among other darts aimed at the Calvinist structure, and incited by Voltaire, he advocated the establishment of a theater in Geneva, belittling the fears of the city fathers that it would corrupt morals. The resulting uproar threw the future of the
Encyclopédie
itself into doubt.

Calm was just returning when Rousseau published a defense of Geneva, including a condemnation of the theater and all forms of drama. A theater, Rousseau fulminated, would be a vehicle for degeneration, immorality, and fake passion. He strongly objected to the theater's artificiality, believing people should generate their own entertainment.

The essay was not directed solely at d'Alembert. Obviously, Voltaire was a target; at that time he was known primarily as a dramatist, and his plays had been produced privately at his Geneva home. To d'Alembert, Voltaire denounced Rousseau as “that bastard of Diogenes's dog.” But Diderot was also hoping to make his name as a playwright. Later, Diderot noted, “[Rousseau] is a monster. … He said he hated all those he had reason to be grateful to and he has proved it.”

Diderot and d'Alembert were not the only victims of Rousseau's belligerence. Between 1756 and 1758, Rousseau became possessed with suspicion of “a vast and diabolical conspiracy” against him. One altercation—so tangled that it is impossible to discern where the truth lies—led to a complete break with both Mme d'Épinay and Grimm.

According to Rousseau, they also plotted to besmirch his reputation. Mme d'Épinay was going to Geneva for treatment by the eminent Dr. Théodore Tronchin. A jowly, broad-faced, broad-shouldered man, pompous and long-winded, if well-meaning, Tronchin was a pioneer of vaccination and a medical innovator. (Rousseau should have approved of him as a medical man, as Tronchin prescribed fresh air and a country life.) Rousseau was asked to escort his benefactress—and refused. Whether she was ill or simply pregnant by Grimm is debatable, though illness seems more likely. However, Rousseau, who was himself unwell, concluded that the conspirators intended him to be seen parading in Geneva as her lover, responsible for her state.

Grimm pressed him to do his duty toward his patron. Rousseau replied in blunt, ungracious terms that he owed her nothing: “If Mme d'Épinay has shown friendship to me, I have shown more to her. … As for benefits, first of all I do not like them, and I owe no thanks for any that people might burden me with by force…. After making one sacrifice to friendship [keeping her company], I must now make another to gratitude.” Grimm boiled over. “If I could pardon you, I should think myself unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of your conduct from my mind.”

Inevitably, Rousseau moved out of the Hermitage. When Diderot came to see him just before he left, the reunion ended in tears. The encyclopedist wrote that he had parted from a madman, and that Rousseau had given him a glimpse across the abyss to the devil and hell. In the twentieth century, Lytton Strachey would depict the breach between these two comrades in more abstract terms—between the old rationalist world and the new world “of self-consciousness and doubt, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart.”

Once again, prosperous benefactors came to Rousseau's aid. In accepting largesse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the evangelist of equality and simplicity, had progressed from the provincial Mme de Warens to the patronage of wealthy tax farmers' wives to the pinnacle of French society—in the form of Charles-François-Frédéric de Montmorency-Luxembourg, duc de Luxembourg and maréchal of France, a distinguished soldier; and his wife, Madeleine-Angélique.

Happily, Rousseau sensed an affinity with the maréchale. When young, she had led a strikingly debauched life, but at this period it was said by one of her former lovers that she provided “a rare example of a pretty woman's victory over time, of an immoral woman's victory over opinion, and that of a friendless woman over friendship.” Horace Walpole's appreciation was just as double-edged, “She has been very handsome, very abandoned, and very mischievous. Her beauty is gone, her lovers are gone, and she thinks the devil is coming.” She presided over an eminent salon, was an arbiter of manners and taste—and was a staunch backer of Rousseau's. For his part, when he set eyes upon her in 1759, according to the
Confessions,
he immediately became her “slave.”

Rousseau had relocated from the Hermitage to a friend's rickety house at Mont-Louis, on de Luxembourg's estate. The maréchal called on him there and, on seeing the dilapidated conditions Rousseau was enduring, urged him to accept a suite in the “enchanting abode” of the Little Château at Montmorency while the Mont-Louis dwelling
was renovated. The Little Château was the perfect setting: Rousseau worked in “deep and delightful solitude, amongst the woods and the waters, to the sounds of birds of every kind, and amidst the perfume of orange blossom, in a continuous ecstasy.”

Rousseau's relationship with his latest hosts casts light on his Platonic ideal of a pure, untainted friendship in which there was space for neither condescension nor any imbalance of power. In spite of their wealth and status, he approved of the maréchal and maréchale because they treated him as an equal; they never compromised the freedom he demanded for himself, or fussed over his income or means of survival. But although he revered his hosts, he divined that there was a strict limit to how familiar he could be with them, anguishing over this incompleteness of intimacy. He wrote to Mme de Luxembourg in October 1760: “Friendship, Madame! Ah, there lies my misfortune. It is good of you and the maréchal to use such a term, but I am a fool to take you at your word. You are amusing yourselves and I am becoming attached to you, and there will be fresh sorrows for me at the end of the game.”

Meanwhile, relations between Rousseau, the citizen of Geneva, and Voltaire, who had been forced out of the city and now lived at Ferney, near the border with France, were fracturing. Voltaire had no patience for Rousseau's assaults on property or the theater. He would later dismiss as abject hypocrisy Rousseau's instructions on how to raise children. On his side, the proud citizen of Geneva resented Voltaire's cultural influence in the place of his birth. In June 1760, he dispatched one his rudest-ever letters to the dramatist. “I do not like you, Sir. … You have ruined Geneva, in return for the asylum you have been given there. … It is you who have made living in my own city impossible for me; it is you who force me to perish on foreign soil, deprived of all the consolations of the dying, cast unceremoniously like a dog on the wayside. … I despise you. You wanted me to. But my hatred is that of a heart fitted to have loved you if you had wanted it.” Voltaire did not answer. To Mme d'Épinay he said, “Jean-Jacques has gone off his head.”

Rousseau could feel quite at ease with one creature: the dog given to him when the animal “was quite young, soon after my arrival at the Hermitage, and which I had called Duke … a title he certainly merited much more than most of the persons by whom it was taken.” Rousseau changed its name to Turc to avoid giving offense to the maréchal, who was a duke.

In 1761, an accident befell Turc and he had to be put down. Rousseau was inconsolable. “Although poor Turc was only a dog he possessed sensibility, disinterestedness and good nature. Alas! As you observe, how many pretended friends fall short of him in worth!” Several of Rousseau's correspondents expressed their sympathy and talked of finding a substitute. The maréchal said the one possibility he had seen so far was “too pretty” for Rousseau's taste. A grief-stricken Rousseau asked them to desist. “It is not another dog I must have, but another Turc, and my Turc is unique. Losses of that kind are not replaceable. I have sworn that my present attachments of every kind shall henceforth be my last.”

T
HE YEARS
1761 and 1762 were Rousseau's
anni mirabiles.
Settled in Montmorency, he produced a sweep of works that in their imaginative force, power of expression, and acute analysis broke free of the prevailing culture and confronted readers with the shock of the modern. First came his romantic epistolary novel,
La nouvelle Héloïse, ou Lettres de deux amans,
also entitled
Julie,
which he had begun in 1757. The seminal political tract
On the Social Contract
fired the fuse of revolt. Its opening phrase has resonated in the ears of revolutionaries down the centuries: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” Then Rousseau overturned the established wisdom on the nature of childhood and education with a radical discourse on the training of the young,
Émile.
This last, in particular, was to bring the wrath of church and state down upon him. Together, these books mounted a sustained, fundamental challenge to religion and the established order. They also made Rousseau by far the highest-paid author in Europe.

Héloïse,
especially, was a phenomenon. Set against a background of pastoral bliss, it is a romantic tragedy that can be read both as an homage to nature and community and as a heartbreaking tug-of-war between virtue and passion. Illustraed by the finest engravers, the work was an instant and international success, its brew of natural love and natural beauty influencing a generation. Appreciative and tearstained letters to the author streamed in from across Europe. In Paris, demand so outstripped supply that booksellers saw a market in renting out the book by the hour (sixty minutes for twelve sous). Into the book Rousseau had poured his passion for Sophie d'Houdetot, an ardor that had left him sighing, weeping, taking to his bed, and experiencing attacks of palsy. She remained loyal to her absent soldier lover, though with misunderstandings aplenty on Rousseau's side. “I was drunk with love without an object,” bemoaned the distraught author.

But
Héloïse
was not the problem. Until
Émile
and
On the Social Contract,
Rousseau's political writings had been indulged. Although the chief censor, the director of the book trade, Lamoignon de Malesherbes, had approved
Émile,
official tolerance of the author now abruptly came to an end. The fourth part of the book, entitled the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” caused the work to be condemned and burned for contesting the authority of the church and the rule of dogma. To the question “What role should the clergy play in a child's training?” Rousseau's answer was simple: none at all.

B
Y
1762,
ROUSSEAU
had become one of the most controversial figures in Europe. In the
Confessions,
he looked back at “the cry of execration that went up against me across Europe, a cry of unparalleled fury. … I was an infidel, an atheist, a lunatic, a madman, a wild beast, a wolf.”

Living under the wing of de Luxembourg, Rousseau was conscious of the commotion over
Émile.
He observed how congratulatory letters from such as d'Alembert were unsigned. “Everything that was said, was said with the strangest precautions, as if there had been some reason for keeping
any admiration for me secret.” But he could not believe he was personally endangered. His patrons were more apprehensive. In the
Confessions,
he recalled that Mme de Boufflers, a friend of Mme de Luxembourg's, “went about with a perturbed air, displaying a great deal of activity and assuring me that [her lover] the Prince de Conti was also taking active measures to ward off the blow that was being prepared for me.” Nonetheless, she asked Rousseau to return her note praising
Émile.