Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  ROUSSEAU’S

  DOG

  Two Great Thinkers at War

  in the Age of Enlightenment

  David Edmonds and

  John Eidinow

  To clan Oppenheimer

  and

  to Elisabeth, Sam, Esther, and Hannah Eidinow

  Love: To regard with the affection of a friend.

  —DR. JOHNSON

  He who has not lived before 1789 has not experienced the true sweetness of life.

  —TALLEYRAND

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 Fear and Flight

  2 Simple Soul

  3 Always a Qualified Success

  4 Plots, Alarums, and Excursions

  5 Exile with the “Friendly Ones”

  6 The Lion and Le Coq

  7 He Would Always Have Paris

  8 Stormy Passage

  9 A London Sensation

  10 Down by the Riverside

  11 Together—and Worlds Apart

  12 An Evening at Lisle Street

  13 The Fashionable Mr. Walpole

  14 Flight from Reason

  15 Three Slaps

  16 Twelve Lies

  17 Willing to Wound

  18 Love Me, Love My Dog

  19 Friends in Arcadia

  20 Where Has My Wild Philosopher Fled?

  21 After the Storm

  22 The Truth Will Out

  Chronology of Main Events

  Dramatis Personae

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Praise for Rousseau’s Dog

  Also by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Fear and Flight

  The rank which the two men held in the Republic of Letters was so high, the interest which their strife exerted was so great, and the spectators of the contest were so eminent that even at this time it deserves to be carefully studied.

  —G. BIRKBECK HILL, ed.,

  Letters of David Hume to William Strahan

  ON THE EVENING of January 10, 1766, the weather in the English Channel was foul—stormy, wet, and cold. That night, after being held in harbor by unfavorable winds, a packet boat beat its way, rolling and plunging, from Calais to Dover. Among the passengers were two men who had met for the first time some three weeks earlier in Paris, a British diplomat and a Swiss refugee. The refugee was accompanied by his beloved dog, Sultan, small and brown with a curly tail. The diplomat stayed below, tormented by seasickness. The refugee remained on deck all night; the frozen sailors marveled at his hardiness.

  If the ship had foundered, she would have carried to the bottom of the Channel two of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century.

  The diplomat was David Hume. His contributions to philosophy on induction, causation, necessity, personal identity, morality, and theism are of such enduring importance that his name belongs in the league of the most elite philosophers, the league that would also include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Wittgenstein. A contemporary and friend of Adam Smith’s, he paved the way to modern economics; he also modernized historiography.

  The refugee was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His intellectual range and achievements were equally staggering. He made epochal contributions to political theory, literature, and education. His autobiography, the Confessions, was a stunningly original work, one that has spawned countless successors but still sets the standard for a narrative of self-revelation and artistic development. Émile, his educational tract, transformed the debate about the upbringing of children and was instrumental in altering our perceptions of childhood. On the Social Contract, his most significant political publication, has been cited as an inspiration for generations of revolutionaries. More fundamentally, Rousseau altered the way we view ourselves, our emotions, and our relationship to society and to the natural world.

  The circumstances in which they traveled together could not have differed more. David Hume was returning to London at the end of his service as secretary of the British embassy in Paris. His twenty-six months in office had been a triumph, perhaps the happiest time of his life. He had been the darling of the Paris salons, the hothouses of the French Enlightenment, winning acclaim for his decency as well as his intellect. He was awarded the appellation le bon David in tribute to his nobility of character.

  Hume’s generosity toward a stranger in distress seemed at one with his good nature. He had accepted the burden of arranging refuge in England for the fifty-three-year-old Rousseau, whose books and pamphlets had aroused such intense religious and political opposition that he had been driven from his domicile in France and then from asylum in his native Switzerland, where a mob, whipped up by a priest, had stoned his house. Recognizing the lethal potency of his pen, the local authorities were determined to rid themselves of so subversive a figure.

  FOR TEN YEARS, Rousseau had sensed himself a man under siege. Convinced of plots against him, with his freedom threatened by the French and Swiss authorities, with his inability to find a permanent resting place, driven from one refuge to another, Rousseau had come to regard persecution as his lot, even his badge of honor. It fitted with his resolution, taken long before, to live alone, away from the world of men. This solitary life did not preclude friendship, but for Rousseau friendship had to be engaged in unequivocally—it involved the total transparency of one person’s heart to another’s. It was possible only between equals and was incompatible with any form of servitude.

  However, Rousseau was now dependent on Hume for survival in a country where he knew no one and could not speak the language. He had left behind, in Switzerland, Thérèse Le Vasseur, the former scullery maid who was his steadfast companion, acting as his gouvernante, or housekeeper, for over thirty years. Rousseau was immensely fond of her, needing her by his side and longing for her when they were separated. Sultan, at least, was with him. Rousseau’s emotions about Sultan were sufficiently intense to amaze onlookers. The onetime dog-owning Hume said, “His affection for that creature is above all expression or conception.”

  For much of his adult life, a second creature had kept Rousseau company.

  “It seems plain,” said Friedrich Grimm, the self-appointed cultural correspondent to the courts of Europe, “that [Rousseau] takes with him a companion who will not suffer him to rest in peace.” This agitated companion, just as inseparable as Sultan and forever growling at Rousseau’s heels, was the writer’s deeply rooted belief that the world was hostile and treacherous, ready at any moment to betray him.

  The boat docked at Dover at midday on January 11. Setting foot on English soil, Rousseau leaped on Hume’s neck, embraced him, not uttering a word, and covered Hume’s face with kisses and tears. Just after the travelers arrived in London, Hume wrote to his brother, “I think I could live with [Rousseau] all my life in mutual friendship and esteem.” Blithely, the letter continued: “I believe that one great source of our concord is, that neither he nor I are disputatious.”

  In Paris, Hume had communed with many of the intellectual luminaries and leading hostesses of the age. Yet, even during the French Enlightenment, with received notions, institutions, and cultures under challenge from radical thinkers in every area of life, no other radical thinker was quite like Rousseau. In all his benevolence, had Hume, le bon David, any real idea of what he had taken on?

  2

  Simple Soul

  Issues from the hand of God the simple soul.

  —ELIOT, Animula

  “MY BIRTH WAS the first of my misfortunes,” Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in the Confessions. He was born in Geneva on June 28
, 1712, the second son of Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, and Susan Bernard, the daughter of a Genevan Calvinist minister. His mother died ten days later. Although he remarried, recorded Rousseau, his father never fully recovered from his wife’s death. Because he saw her in his infant second son, his embraces were always grief-laden. A half century later, Rousseau vividly recalled how, when his father suggested that they should talk about the mother, he replied, “Very well, Father, but we are sure to cry.”

  For a child suffering from devastating loss and its concomitant anger and yearning, such demands must have been traumatic. Little wonder if Rousseau carried into adulthood a craving for unconditional love, combined with an expectation of betrayal and a lack of trust in others. Little wonder if he lived with a sense of innocence lost, regret for a life of happiness just missed, and a preoccupation with his inner self: an inner self that was in some ways more reliable than the external world. He might get the facts wrong, “but I cannot go wrong about what I felt.”

  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.

  GENEVA 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.

  FAME, 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.

  FOR 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 cer
tainly 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.