Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World's Classics)

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Although this is only a pleasure born of sensation, it nevertheless has a moral cause, and the proof of this is that the same sight, instead of delighting and pleasing me, can fill me with pain and indignation when I know that the signs of pleasure and joy on the faces of the wicked are nothing but signs that their wickedness has been satisfied. Only the signs of innocent joy delight my heart. Those of cruel and mocking joy wound and distress it, even if it has nothing to do with me. No doubt these signs cannot be exactly the same, since they are based on such different principles: but nevertheless they are all signs of joy, and the visible differences between them are certainly not proportionate to the differences between the emotions they arouse in me.

  The signs of pain and suffering affect me still more, so much so that I find it impossible to bear them without myself being stirred by emotions which are perhaps yet more intense than those which they express. My imagination reinforces sensation and makes me identify myself with the suffering being and often causes me more anguish than he himself feels. A discontented face is another sight that it is impossible for me to bear, especially if I suspect that this discontent concerns me. I cannot say how many écus were extracted from me by the grumpy and gloomy faces of valets serving unwillingly in the houses to which I used to be foolish enough to let myself be dragged and where the servants always made me pay a very high price for their masters’ hospitality.* Always affected too much by things I see, and particularly by signs of pleasure or suffering, affection or dislike, I let myself be carried away by these external impressions without ever being able to avoid them other than by fleeing. A sign, a gesture or a glance from a stranger is enough to disturb my peace or calm my suffering: I am only my own master when I am alone; at all other times I am the plaything of all those around me.

  I used to enjoy living in society, when I saw only affection in everyone’s eyes or at worst indifference in the eyes of those to whom I was unknown. But today, when as much care is taken to show my face to people as to hide my true character from them, I cannot set foot in the street without finding myself surrounded by distressing things; I quickly hurry off to the countryside; as soon as I see the greenery, I begin to breathe. Is it any surprise that I love solitude? I see only animosity on men’s faces, and nature always smiles at me.

  However, I must admit that I still feel pleasure in living among men as long as my face is unknown to them. But this is a pleasure which I am rarely allowed to enjoy. A few years ago I still liked walking through villages and, in the mornings, seeing workers repairing their flails or women in their doorways with their children. There was something about this sight that touched my heart. I sometimes stopped, unthinkingly, to watch the little ways of these fine folk, and I felt myself sighing without knowing why. I do not know if it was noticed that I was touched by this little pleasure and there was therefore a desire to rob me of it, but the change I saw on people’s faces as I walked past and the way they looked at me made me realize that someone had taken great care to remove my incognito. The same thing happened to me, and in a yet more striking fashion, at the Invalides.* I have always been interested in this fine establishment. I can never look without emotion and veneration at those groups of good old men who can say like those of Lacedaemon:

  We were, in former days,

  Young, valiant, and brave.*

  One of my favourite walks was around the Military Academy, and I used to enjoy meeting here and there some of the veterans who, retaining their old military courtesy, saluted me as I went by. This salute, which my heart returned to them a hundred-fold, delighted me and heightened my pleasure at seeing them. Since I am unable to conceal anything of what moves me, I often talked about the veterans and about how seeing them affected me. That is all it took. Some time later, I noticed that I was no longer a stranger to them, or rather that I was much more of a stranger to them than I had been, since they now looked at me in the same way as the general public did. No more courtesy, no more greetings. An off-putting manner and an unwelcoming look had taken the place of their original politeness. The sincerity of their former profession did not allow them, as others do, to disguise their animosity under a sneering and treacherous mask; they displayed quite openly the most violent hatred towards me, and so extreme is my wretched state that I am forced to respect most of all those who disguise their fury the least.

  Since that time, I have taken less pleasure in walking over by the Invalides; however, since my feelings for them are not dependent on theirs for me, I cannot look at these former defenders of their country with anything but respect and affection: but I find it very hard to find myself so poorly repaid by them for the justice I do them. When I happen to meet one of them who has escaped the general instruction or who, not knowing my face, shows no aversion to me, the courteous greeting I receive from him is enough to make up for the rudeness of all the others. I forget them and think only about him, and I imagine that he has a soul like mine, which hatred can never reach. I had this very pleasure last year when I was crossing the river to go walking on the Île des Cygnes.* A poor old veteran in a boat was waiting for people to cross with him. I stepped into the boat and told the boatman to set off. The current was strong and the crossing was long. I hardly dared speak to the veteran for fear of being spoken to rudely and rebuffed as usual, but his courteous appearance reassured me. We chatted. He seemed to me to be a man of good sense and good morals. I was surprised and charmed by his open and affable manner, I was not used to such kindness; my surprise ceased when I learned that he had just arrived from the provinces. I realized that he had not yet been shown my face or given his instructions. I took advantage of my incognito to have a few moments of conversation with a man, and the delight I found in doing so made me aware of how the value of the most common of pleasures can be increased by their being rare. As he got out of the boat, he prepared to hand over his two poor liards. I paid for the crossing and begged him to put his money away, trembling lest he take offence. That did not happen; on the contrary, he seemed moved by my thoughtfulness in paying and above all in helping him, because he was older than me, to get out of the boat. Who would have thought that I was childlike enough to cry with pleasure? I was dying to hand him a 24 sols coin so that he could get some tobacco, but I never dared. The same embarrassment which held me back then has often prevented me since from doing good deeds which would have filled me with joy, and abstaining from them has only made me regret my weakness. On this occasion, having left my old veteran, I soon consoled myself with the thought that I would have, as it were, contradicted my own principles if I had placed on courteous actions the sort of monetary value that degrades their nobility and tarnishes their disinterestedness. One should hasten to help those in need, but in everyday human dealings, let us allow natural good will and politeness each to do its work without ever letting anything venal or mercantile dare come close to such a pure source and corrupt or sully it. It is said that in Holland people expect to be paid for telling you the time or showing you the way. It must be a very contemptible people that can trade in the simplest duties of humanity in this way.

  I have noticed that only in Europe is hospitality bought and sold. Throughout Asia you are lodged for free. I realize that it is not so easy to find your creature comforts there. But is it not something to be able to say to yourself: ‘I am a man and am taken in as a guest by humans. It is pure humanity that gives me shelter’? Minor hardships are easy to endure when the heart is better treated than the body.

  TENTH WALK

  TODAY, Palm Sunday,* it is exactly fifty years since I first met Madame de Warens.* She was twenty-eight then, having been born with the century.* I was not yet seventeen,* and my nascent temperament, which I was still unaware of, made my naturally ardent heart burn with renewed heat. If it was unsurprising that she should develop an affection for a lively but gentle, modest, and quite pleasant-looking young man, it was even less surprising that a charming, intelligent, and graceful woman should make me feel not only grat
itude but also more tender feelings which I was unable to distinguish from it. But what is more unusual is that this one moment determined my whole life and produced, through an inevitable logic, the destiny of the rest of my days.* My soul, whose most precious faculties had not yet been fully developed by my bodily organs, still had no definite form. It was waiting somehow impatiently for the moment that would give it form, but this moment, though hastened by this meeting, did not come for a good while, and with my simple ways, given to me by my education, I saw this delightful but short-lived state stretching out far ahead of me, where love and innocence inhabit the same heart together. She had sent me away.* Everything called me back to her, I had to return. This return decided my destiny, and a long time before I possessed her, I lived solely in her and for her. Ah, if only I had satisfied her heart in the way she satisfied mine. What peaceful and delightful days we would have spent together. We did have some such days, but how brief and fleeting they were, and what a fate followed them. Not a day goes by without my remembering with joy and emotion that one, short time in my life when I was fully myself, unadulterated and unhindered, and when I can really say that I lived. I can say more or less the same as the Praetorian Prefect who, having been disgraced under Vespasian, went off to the country to end his days in peace: ‘I have spent seventy years on earth and have lived for seven of them.’* Had it not been for this short but precious period, I would perhaps have remained uncertain about myself, for throughout the rest of my life, weak and unresisting, I have been so shaken, tossed, and pulled about by others’ passions that, almost passive in such a stormy life, I would struggle to identify what there is of mine in my own conduct, so unceasingly has harsh necessity weighed down upon me. But during those few years, loved by a very gentle and obliging woman, I did what I wanted to do, I was what I wanted to be, and, through the use I made of my leisure time, helped by her teaching and example, I was able to give my still simple and naïve soul the form which was better suited to it and which it has retained ever since. The taste for solitude and contemplation was born in my heart together with the expansive and tender feelings whose purpose it is to feed it. Turmoil and noise constrain and suffocate them, calm and peace revive and intensify them. I need to retire within myself in order to love. I persuaded Mama* to live in the country. An isolated house on a valley slope was our refuge,* and it is there that, in the space of four or five years, I enjoyed a century of life and a pure, complete happiness, the delights of which outweigh all that is dreadful in my current fate. I needed a female friend after my own heart, and I had her. I had longed for the countryside, and I had obtained it; I could not bear subjection, and I was perfectly free, indeed better than free because, subject only to my own affections, I only did what I wanted to do. All my time was filled with loving cares and country pursuits. I wanted nothing other than for this sweet state to continue. The only thing distressing me was the fear that it would not continue for long, and this fear, born of the difficulties of our situation, was not unfounded. From then on I sought to ensure I had both distractions from this anxiety and the means by which to avoid its coming true. I decided that a treasure trove of talents was the surest protection against poverty, and I resolved to use my free time to ensure I was able, if possible, one day to repay the best of women for all the help I had received from her.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  for fifteen years or more: since Rousseau began writing his Reveries in September 1776, he may be alluding here to his flight from Montmorency in June 1762 following the publication of Émile, which was condemned by the Parlement de Paris, who also ordered the author’s arrest.

  a frenzy which has taken no less than ten years to subside: in spring 1767, some nine and a half years before beginning the Reveries, Rousseau thought that David Hume had drawn him into a trap in England, and fled in May that year.

  irrevocably fixed for evermore: it is impossible to say with any certainty what this event was, though it could be the death of his sometime protector, the prince de Conti, on 2 August 1776, about a month before Rousseau started writing the Reveries.

  trying to ensure that they survive for posterity: an allusion to Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues (Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues), a work of self-defence, made up of three dialogues, which Rousseau wrote between 1772 and 1776. Having failed in his attempt to place the manuscript of his work on the high altar of Notre-Dame, Paris, on 24 February 1776, he tried to ensure its posterity by giving a copy to Condillac as well as a copy of the first dialogue to the young Englishman Brooke Boothby, who published it in Lichfield in 1780; in 1778 he gave the complete manuscript to his friend Paul Moultou, who helped to have it published in 1782.

  the doctors: in Book 8 of the Confessions, Rousseau describes how he lost faith in doctors: ‘For several years now, tortured by urinary retention, I had been entirely in the hands of the doctors, who, without alleviating my pain, had exhausted my strength and destroyed my constitution.… Resolving, whether I was cured or killed, to dispense with doctors and with medicines, I said farewell to them for ever and began to live from day to day’ (trans. Angela Scholar, ed. Patrick Coleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 380).

  the Oratorians: a secular congregation of priests living in community without vows; the French Oratory was founded in 1611 by Pierre de Bérulle. Rousseau had enjoyed a close relationship with the Oratorians at Montmorency, namely père Alamanni and père Mandard, to whom he refers in Book 11 of the Confessions (p. 567), but they fell out over Émile; and when the former priest of Montmorency, père de Muly, was appointed head of the Oratory in 1773, Rousseau thought that the whole organization had turned against him.

  my Confessions: on the relationship between Rousseau’s Reveries and his Confessions, see the Introduction, above, p. xiii.

  I shall soon have to render: this echoes the beginning of the Confessions: ‘Let the trumpet of judgement sound when it will, I will present myself with this book in my hand before the Supreme Judge’ (p. 5).

  I am writing my reveries entirely for myself: on the relationship between Rousseau’s Reveries and Montaigne’s Essays, see the Introduction, above, pp. xix–xxiii.

  the rue du Chemin vert: this road, which still exists today, led from what was then the Rue de la Contrescarpe (now the Boulevard Beaumarchais) north-eastwards to the heights where the Père Lachaise Cemetery is now situated and onwards past the hamlet of Ménilmontant to the village of Charonne. Both the hamlet and the village were only absorbed into the city of Paris in 1860.

  the picris hieracioides of the Compositae family: commonly known as hawk-weed ox-tongue.

  the bupleurum falcatum of the Umbelliferae family: commonly known as hare’s ear root.

  the cerastium aquaticum: of the Caryophyllaceae family and commonly known as water chickweed.

  I placed in my collection: on Rousseau’s interest in botany, see the Introduction, above, pp. xvi–xvii.

  the Galant Jardinier: a cabaret in Paris.

  a carriage: belonging to Michel Étienne Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau (1736–78), the president of the Parlement de Paris.

  ‘At the Haute Borne’: literally ‘The Upper Milepost’, a reference to the upper part of the rue de Ménilmontant (the present-day rue Oberkampf ), beyond the intersection of the rue du Bas Pincourt (the present-day rue Saint-Maur).

  the Temple: a reference to the Enclosure of the Temple where the Priory of the Knights Templar and the Tower of the Temple were located; both were demolished in 1811, and today only the Square du Temple remains.

  the half-league: approximately two kilometres.

  rue Plâtrière: the present-day rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  My wife’s cries: Rousseau married Thérèse Levasseur (1721–1801) in 1768, though they had been together since 1745.

  I have always hated shadows: see also Book 11 of the Confessions: ‘My natural tendency is to fear shadows; I dread and detest their air of darkness; mystery always disturbs me; it is too antipatheti
c to my own nature, which is open to the point of imprudence’ (p. 553).

  Monsieur Lenoir, the police lieutenant general: Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir (1732–1807) was lieutenant general of police in Paris from 1774 to 1785.

  Madame d’Ormoy: Charlotte Chaumet d’Ormoy (1732?-91) was the author of a one-act opéra-comique performed at Versailles, entitled Zelmis, or the

  Young Savage (Zelmis, ou la jeune sauvage, 1780), a short story entitled The Lama in Love (Le Lama amoureux, 1781), and two novels: The Misfortunes of Young Emélie (Les Malheurs de la jeune Emélie, 1777), to which Rousseau refers here, and Wavering Virtue, or the Life of Mlle d’Amincourt (La Vertu chancelante, ou la vie de Mlle d’Amincourt, 1778), which she dedicated to Frederick of Prussia, though her authorship is disputed.