Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  A number of legends grew up around Rousseau’s limited contact with country folk. Local lore had it that some mistook him for a king driven from his realm. It was said that he wandered at night over the Weaver Hills (“when the fairies were out”). Nearby, at Stanton, was a lead mine, and Rousseau is thought to have made the acquaintance of workers there: his accounts show him donating money to the lead miners in August 1766, an intriguing action, given his ambiguous attitude to accepting gifts from others.

  In 1840, the social historian William Howitt went to Wootton in search of memories of Rousseau and in Visits to Remarkable Places documented the clear recollections from some of the oldest inhabitants of the area, transcribing their strong Staffordshire accent.

  “What, owd Ross Hall? Ay know him did I, well enough. Ah’ve seen him monny an’ monny a time, every day welly, coming and going ins comical cap an’ ploddy gown, a gathering his yarbs.” “Yes there war a lady—they cawd her Madam Zell, but whether how war his wife or not, ah dunna know. Folks said how warna.”

  Howitt gives the only evidence of Le Vasseur speaking English. Davenport’s housekeeper was beaten by her husband and the outcry brought some villagers running up. “Madam Zell in a state of great excitement said in her few words of English to some young women,—’Never marry! Never marry! You see! You see!’”

  Another of his stories has it that when Rousseau was out one day, a man approached him to inquire if he was a botanist. This was Erasmus Darwin, physician, scientist, educationist, standard-bearer for the industrial revolution, and leading member of the pathfinding Lunar Society of enlightened scientific thinkers (also grandfather of Charles). Apparently, Darwin had learned when Rousseau was due to pass a particular spot. Immediately recognizing that the encounter was not by chance, Rousseau was so wary that Darwin never came near him again.

  AWAY FROM THE world of betrayal and conspiracy, Rousseau’s life was one of playfulness, sociability, and charm. Intimacy with Hume had been out of the question, but Rousseau could relax with a Woottoon neighbor, a stiff, reticent, and, it seems, endearingly grumpy sixty-seven-year-old. The relationship between Bernard Granville and the fiery Genevan was both touching and incongruous, though (initially) Rousseau regarded it as purely superficial. “I talk merely about inconsequential things with the only neighbour with whom I converse—because he’s the only one who speaks French.”

  Granville lived some two miles from Wootton Hall at Calwich Abbey, which he had purchased four decades earlier. The mansion was in a valley with the river Dove only two hundred yards away and the grounds were constantly flooded.

  A man of substantial means, Granville dedicated time and money to improving his gardens; he put in a lake, for example, with a wooded island in its center connected to the bank by a pretty little bridge. At the front of the house was a bowling green. According to Granville’s younger sister, Mrs. Mary Delany, the estate was “said to out-do any of the wonders of the Peak.”

  Shared with Rousseau, Granville’s other passion was music. In a room dedicated to music, he had an organ that had been chosen for him by the composer George Frideric Handel, a neighbor of Mary Delany’s in London.

  Of Mary Delany, Edmund Burke said, “she was the truly great woman of fashion, not only of the present, but of all ages.” Then sixty-six, she still retained her irrepressible vitality, her bright eyes, and her wave of curly hair. She had the reputation for being deeply spiritual as well as cultured and artistic. George III and Queen Charlotte welcomed her at court.

  Rousseau was introduced to Granville’s wider family. Of his nieces and nephews, Granville’s favorite was another Mary, born in 1746. This Mary was a frequent visitor to Calwich, especially after the death of her mother, Granville’s sister Anne Dewes, in 1761. She had been given a traditional upbringing, learning dance, deportment, lacework, and French—she was confident enough to write to Rousseau in his own language.

  Rousseau obviously warmed to Mary, in an avuncular way, addressing her in letters as his belle voisine, his lovely neighbor. The (rather childish) twenty-year-old appears to have taken in her stride the attention paid her by her uncle’s unlikely neighbor, the international celebrity. On one occasion, she embroidered a collar for Sultan, receiving in return a gallant and comical note of thanks.

  My lovely neighbour, you make me unjust and jealous for the first time in my life: I could not see, without envy, the chains with which you would honour my Sultan, and I stole from him the privilege of wearing them first.

  Although Rousseau treated her with nothing more than affection, his mere proximity was enough to make Mrs. Delany apprehensive. She was not familiar with Rousseau’s oeuvre, as “I avoid engaging in books from whose subtlety I might perhaps receive some prejudice,” but she was uneasy about Rousseau’s influence. “Now for a word about Monsieur Rousseau, who has gained so much of your admiration. His writings are ingenious, no doubt, and were they weeded from the false and erroneous sentiments that are blended through his works (as I have been told), they would be as valuable as they are entertaining.”

  Mrs. Delany then played a role in successfully dissuading a wealthy Irish landowner, the Marchioness of Kildare, from approaching Rousseau. Although the marchioness, too, had not read Émile, she was of the opinion, until Mrs. Delany convinced her otherwise, that the educational innovator might be the perfect tutor for her eldest son.

  In winter, apart from Rousseau, Calwich had few visitors. But from June there was an endless stream of guests who came for the vistas, the vigorous walks, the clean air, and to admire Granville’s landscaping. They included Brooke Boothby from Ashbourne and Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the duchess of Portland.

  The duchess was an intimate friend of Mary Delany’s and was another remarkable woman. Widow of the second Duke of Portland, she combined a sharp intellect with an obsession for collecting that extended from objets d’art to natural history, from the Portland Vase to seashells (she was a serial snail slayer; a thousand died at her fair hands). But her true zeal was for botany, and she was acquainted with all the prominent botanists of the day.

  If the duchess had heard the talk in London society of Rousseau’s maligning Hume’s name, it seems not to have made an impression on her. Rousseau appeared to be a normal, if strangely dressed, enthusiast for botany. She went with him into the Peak District on an expedition, and from that time on Rousseau occasionally puffed himself as herboriste de la duchesse de Portland. They flattered each other in correspondence, and the duchess sent her Swiss acquaintance seeds and plants—including, in August 1766, some “great tufted wood vetch [found] growing upon a high bank.” He thanked her, on September 3, 1766: “If I had not had any love of botany, the plants M. Granville has sent me from you would have given it to me.” The natural world suffused his soul with a “precious serenity.” Botany was conducive to wisdom and virtue, “chaining the passions with bonds of flowers.” The duchess was charmed by the grace of expression.

  BACK AT WOOTTON Hall there were few distractions, and to those who met him, Rousseau seemed in high spirits. Davenport put in occasional appearances, and Rousseau assisted him in clearing and cutting back the woods. Once or twice he showed up with his granddaughter Phoebe, of whom he was very fond, and grandson Davies. Davenport and Rousseau played chess, though the old gentleman could not put up much resistance. Rousseau engaged in good-natured banter, pretending Davenport lost to him intentionally.

  During August, Rousseau and Le Vasseur visited Davenport at Davenport Hall in Cheshire. Brooke Boothby dropped in at Wootton now and again, visits that meant so much to him that in his portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, he is holding a volume of Rousseau. Only in his mid-twenties, he had been at a military academy in Caen and so was fluent in French.

  However, the sole regular, day-to-day company was provided by Davenport’s servants, with whom Rousseau delighted in not being able to communicate. Taking care of his and his gouvernante’s needs were the steward Benjamin Walton, John Cowper and his housekeepe
r wife, and the watchman Samuel Finney. There was also Davenport’s near-blind, nonagenarian former nurse; she and Le Vasseur quarreled incessantly.

  BESIDES HIS BOTANY, the local social life, and his countermeasures against plotters out to destroy him, what else was there to keep the fugitive occupied?

  He continued to take an active interest in Genevan politics, siding with the Représentants, the Party of Liberty as he called them, who were pushing to extend rights and prosperity among the population. Their opponents condemned this struggle as a threat to the city’s unity. France backed the existing political settlement—in effect, the oligarchy—and put the city under an increasingly tight blockade. From Wootton, Rousseau sent moral and financial support to its beleaguered citizens. In January 1767, he wrote to François-Henri d’Ivernois praising the Représentants, comparing their valor to the courage displayed by Roman senators about to be killed by Gauls.

  However, once he had adapted to Staffordshire, Rousseau reverted to what he knew best, the pen, although he had chided Mme de Boufflers for her stress on his continuing to work. Davenport relayed to Hume that he found his tenant “busy writing; and it should be some large affair, from the quantity of paper he bought.” (News Hume greeted with terror.)

  After the weather improved, a favorite haunt was in the shade under a stand of trees known as Twenty Oaks, not far from Wootton Hall. Another choice nook was a small, U-shaped grotto, about six square meters in size, situated adjacent to the main house, and built into the solid, sandstone rock. Even Rousseau, slight as he was, would have had to squeeze through the low, narrow, wooden doorway. Inside were a stone seat, a fireplace in the corner, and a small, open window looking out onto a passageway leading to the basement of the main building. Here Rousseau composed a major section of a book accepted today as a landmark in literature. We could say of it what Rousseau’s biographer John Morley said of On the Social Contract: it ranked in history as an act, not a book.

  “I wrote the first part,” says Rousseau, “with pleasure and gratification, and at my ease.” And indeed, the opening half of his autobiography, the Confessions, is full of sunny vignettes and happy reminiscences, though, as we have seen, his early life had its share of hurt, even torment, which he picked over in masochistic detail. “All the memories which I had to recall were for me so many fresh enjoyments. I turned back to them incessantly with renewed pleasure, and I was able to revise my descriptions until I was satisfied with them, without feeling in the least bored.”

  Rousseau began the Confessions well before coming to Wootton, and completed them well after he had left, in 1770. But he labored over much of part one of the book while he was in England. That part, which conducts the reader through his life up to his going to Paris in 1742, contains six “books,” or chapters, as does the notably darker part two. So feared by Hume, the autobiography stops abruptly just short of Rousseau’s setting out for Strasbourg. The next stage of his life was reserved for part three, never to be written (although in part one he does refer to a visit made “a few days ago” to Davenport, where something occurred to remind him of learning arithmetic as a child).

  Rousseau’s last thought in the Confessions was to record a statement he made after reading his work to a group of five aristocrats (whom he carefully names). He avowed to them the truth of what he had written. Anyone who challenged it was guilty of a lie or imposture. Anyone who examined his life and who could still believe him a dishonorable man deserved to be stifled. Thus, in the final act, the watchmaker’s son from Geneva presents himself as justified in the high court of honor.

  The title was surely a nod to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, but in Rousseau’s more subversive version, the truth about one’s character and actions could be arrived at through introspection alone, and without needing any recourse to God.

  The memoirs (“the history of my soul”) are still in print more than two centuries later, the text pored over by academics and biographers. Epochal claims are made for it—that it heralds the breakdown of the distinction between public and private, the dawn of our confessional era in which declaration of guilt itself becomes a virtue that helps cleanse the soul and diminish the offense, that it instigates a path of self-regard that ineluctably leads to the voluntary revelations of reality television shows, that it opens the way to particularism and the rejection of universal values, that it announces a radically new culture in which emotional truth is to be accorded a higher value than external evidence, that it is pioneering in its stress on the significance of childhood, both as a stage in our life of interest for its own sake, and for its impact on the formation of character.

  This social and moral priority given to emotional honesty is crucial, though there is also a strong element of self-justification. Certainly there are dozens of factual inaccuracies in the Confessions—scholars have established that Rousseau gets dates wrong and, on occasion, mixes up the chronology of events. On the whole, these particulars are trivial, though sometimes the error colors our judgment of an episode. For example, Rousseau says that he was first spanked at age eight, and the feeling of sensuality it gave him made him “desirous of experiencing it again.” In fact, he was eleven (with all the turmoil of approaching adolescence)—knowledge of which transforms our reading of the scene. In chronicling his early life, Rousseau often had little more to rely on than his memory; it is not surprising that he makes a few mistakes. It is far more surprising that he makes so few.

  What caused such a furor—and distress to supporters such as Mme de Boufflers—was the book’s brazen openness about the author and his cast of characters. While there is a line of autobiographies stretching back to Saint Augustine, one must remember that at the time there was still no established genre of literary autobiography. Though this was the great age of untrammeled biography, the word autobiography was not used until a Monthly Review article in 1797. The first person to proclaim the work’s uniqueness was Jean-Jacques himself, and he did so on the very first line.

  I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. My purpose is to display to my fellows a man entirely true to nature—and that man is myself.

  He wrote that he was going to expose his life to the world, “vile and despicable when my behaviour was such, as good, generous and noble when I was so.” And he was true to his word—the vile episodes he recounted included stealing, being sexually assaulted and visiting brothels, flashing at women in Turin (the latter presented as pathetically comic for the perpetrator). He also goes into the moral “crime” that many found unforgivable: the abandoning of his five children to the Paris foundling hospital.

  The Confessions is not all excitement. Indeed, it took some self-absorption to imagine that the humdrum details of his life, his diurnal comings and goings, his friendships and feuds, his emotional highs and lows, would be of interest to anybody but himself. The Monthly Review, shortly after the Confessions was first published, barked that Rousseau was

  a man whose vanity and presumption so imposed on his understanding, as to lead him to imagine that mankind would lend a ready ear to the most trifling, to the most dull, to the most impertinent, to the most disgusting relations, because they concerned ROUSSEAU!

  Some passages are inescapably Pooterish, but Rousseau sees himself in these pages as not just a man; he represents humanity, in all its moral, emotional, and physical complexity. The unremitting wholeness of the portrait lifts the Confessions into a class of its own and sets the standard of revelation for generations to come. It contains flashes of brilliant illumination and insight. It can be tender, tragic, poignant, and poetic. There are moments of charged sensuality. There are moments of sheer joy. There is drama, there is gossip and bitchiness, there are times when Rousseau is brave, others when he is cowardly; times when he is embittered, others when he is generous. There are moments when it is unclear whether the reader is expected to laugh or cry. Thus, early on he describes the death of Mme de Vercellis, in whose household he w
orked. “At last, speaking no more, and already in the agonies of death, she broke wind loudly. ‘Good!’ she said, turning round, ‘a woman who can fart is not dead!’ These were the last words she uttered.” (Rousseau also recorded that she was a woman of ability and judgment “who died like a philosopher.”)

  The unsparingly open Rousseau presented here does not exempt the reader from his nightmare world—one far removed from the soulful contemplation of tufted wood vetch and the delightful exchanges with his belle voisine. In part two of the book, a thread of secret foes and plots lurking behind the mask of comradeship, a sense of gloom and foreboding, evoke a gothic mood in what is held out as honest recollection. In this world, the innocent narrator is helpless against the schemes of his adversaries, as in this extract from Book X, when he moved to Montmorency: “my heart clung still to attachments which gave my enemies countless holds on me; and the feeble rays that penetrated to my retreat served only to show me the darkness of the mysteries that were hidden from me.”

  If Wootton presented the exile with the pastoral joy and peace of Arcadia, its rustic beauties did not ensure Rousseau a refuge from that darkness.

  20

  Where Has My Wild Philosopher Fled?

  If all men had but the tenth part of Mr. Rousseau’s goodness of heart, we should have a much better & much more peaceable world.