Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  —DAVENPORT

  I have always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: “My God, make our enemies very ridiculous!” God has granted it to me.

  —VOLTAIRE writing about Rousseau

  THE EXILES WERE enduring a second cold spring in Staffordshire. The mists and incessant rain made Wootton Hall seem more cut off than ever. The two Englishmen to whom Rousseau was most attached, Davenport and Granville, were away. Granville had gone to Bath, Davenport was in London. Rousseau’s gouvernante was increasingly restless. Not only was the damp air making her ill, life at Wootton for this Parisian former kitchen maid had become the torture of solitary confinement. This bleak isolation was reinforced by constant battles with the house servants. Le Vasseur claimed to have discovered Davenport’s nonagenarian former nurse stirring cinders into their meals. She and the nurse continued to bicker (presumably with limited comprehension) from morning till night.

  After the turn of the year, as winter lingered on, Rousseau made no secret of his yearning to leave. As early as February, he had conferred with Davenport about the sale of his library, and on March 12, with Davenport’s help, he sold it en bloc to Vincent-Louis Dutens, an Anglican priest, an associate of Mme de Boufflers’s, and an unusual figure in being a Frenchman who served occasionally in the British diplomatic service. In return, Dutens gave him an annuity often pounds.

  In mid-March, Rousseau mulled over the possibility of removing to London or Chiswick. Le Vasseur’s health might benefit. To Dutens he remarked that he would rather put himself at the mercy of all the devils in hell than that of English servants. In London or the suburbs, they could find a pension with an English-speaking French or Swiss domestic to run their errands. It was the only way to be sure of peace and independence.

  In a letter to Davenport, Rousseau reminded his landlord that he had deprived him of his house for a year, thanked him effusively for his hospitality, and asked for his assistance in moving. The plan was to leave most of their effects and just take their “togs” in one small box for the coach; the main items would be safer at Wootton than being transported hither and thither.

  Davenport was anxious that his guest not be abandoned. He offered another of his houses in Cheshire, Calvely (in his family since the fifteenth century), three times the size of Wootton, with cows and a large garden and in “remarkably soft air,” healthier for Le Vasseur. However, if Rousseau was set on going to London, he volunteered help to get him there and search for lodgings. But by the end of the month, he was again urging Rousseau and Le Vasseur to stay in the country. “I wish to God you would let me send her along with you to Calvely.” Rousseau declined. He wanted his own household. As for Le Vasseur, she was still deteriorating (it was not surprising given her sad existence). She hoped in London there would be people to talk to. Her request was perfectly reasonable; after all, she had left family and friends to be at his side.

  Davenport had also asked his tenant’s permission to revive the question of a royal pension. Rousseau agreed: if the favor came only from the king and his ministers, he would accept at once. He would implacably reject it if it were owed to the solicitations of anyone else. He was never to discover that when Davenport approached Conway, Conway consulted Hume. The Scot endorsed the idea, or, in his words to Blair, he had “exhorted [Conway] to do so charitable an action.”

  Conway arranged the pension even though he was entangled in the low politics of Chatham’s administration, moderating American policy, and negotiating over proposals for a parliamentary inquiry into the East India Company (and the regulation of its income). He officially informed Davenport of the king’s approval for a pension of £100 per annum on March 18, 1767 (by which point Davenport had braved Rousseau’s wrath by telling him that Hume had been appointed undersecretary to Conway).

  I found in His M. an immediate readiness to comply with my application, that neither M. Rousseau’s former refusal, nor any other circumstances which have since happened [Authors’ italics] might prevent the effect of His M’s intended bounty. You’ll therefore be so good as to acquaint M. Rousseau with what has past & with the pleasure I had in being thus employed to procure any degree of ease and satisfaction to a person of Monsr R’s distinguished talents.

  In making his recommendation to the noble Conway, le bon David had had to rise above his feelings about Rousseau, though rancor still permeates his own account of the episode. While exaggerating his part in the regranting of the pension, he relayed to friends (wrongly) that “the King was very much prejudiced against Rousseau,” and that Rousseau’s change of mind proved the “suspicion which I always entertained” that he thought he had sufficient interest to obtain the pension by himself, and “that he only picked a quarrel with me in order to free himself from the humiliating burden of gratitude towards me. His motives, therefore, were much blacker than many seem to apprehend them.”

  Hume was presumably unaware that in January the then prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, had remitted the duty on Rousseau’s books from France and, as Davenport reported to his tenant, “has ordered this to be done immediately & he wishes that it may be represented to Mr. Rousseau as a compliment intended by the King in showing him this little mark of DISTINCTION.”

  IN PASSING ON the news about the pension, Davenport judged it wise to gloss over Hume’s role. He told Rousseau that the pension came only from the king himself and his immediate ministers.

  He judged well. His tenant had certainly not put the Hume “plot” behind him: a February note to Brooke Boothby refers to “the treachery of M. Hume” and “his secret intrigues.” He asked Boothby, who was in Marseille, to send “a small twig of an olive tree with the flower well preserved in a book: this would give me great pleasure, if only because of the augury.” An augury of what? Did Rousseau imagine himself in a Gethsemane?

  He still pined for authentic friendship as he defined it, mourning the rupture with Earl Marischal, behind which he detected the maneuverings of both le bon David and the son of the jongleur (Tronchin). In mid-March, he complained to Marischal that the earl had never specified Rousseau’s wrongdoing. In any case, the accused man was not the real Rousseau, he said. Someone had given a phantom his name.

  Davenport’s kindliness was a poor substitute for bona fide friendship. To Du Peyrou, Rousseau lamented that though “Mr. Davenport renders me great services with much affection and zeal, he never says anything to me, never replies to my outpourings of feeling. I never saw in my whole life a man so reserved, so profoundly mysterious. I believe him to be a gentleman: but he is an intimate friend of good David; that’s all I know.” Only Sultan could offer him that transparent and pure fullness of love. And all the while, Rousseau could hear his other dog snarling.

  Dark fantasies of plotters and hidden hands still held the exile in their grip. After a letter from Du Peyrou had been misdirected to Rousseau’s cousin and sent on to him opened, Rousseau informed Du Peyrou in April 1767 that his “dear cousin” was in league with his enemies. On all sides there were traps awaiting him. “Oh destiny, O my friend, pray for me. I have not merited the misfortunes which are crushing me.” Spies had been dispatched to steal his papers; their preservation was now of the utmost importance. Although he was under constant surveillance from those who would stop them escaping, and all his post was monitored, providence had sent a friend of Du Peyrou’s into Rousseau’s neighborhood. This man would arrange for a courier to collect the papers which could then be forwarded on to Du Peyrou.

  This providential figure was Jean-François-Maximilian Cerjat. He lived in Louth in Lincolnshire—a small market town, with a large fulling mill (for treating cloth)—and was in the Ashbourne area in January 1767. (Mysteriously, a phrase in one of Hume’s letters shows that he had heard that Rousseau was intending to stay with a friend in Lincolnshire. Perhaps Rousseau’s fears were not altogether unfounded.)

  At this point, Davenport promised his tenant that he would visit Wootton after he had spent Easter week with his daught
er in Warwickshire. It meant, he explained, that he would be at Wootton on April 26 at the earliest.

  In fact, on leaving his daughter, Davenport did not go straight to Rousseau but diverted to his Cheshire seat, Davenport Hall, arriving there on April 27. He had intended to stay for only a couple of days, but was laid low by gout, unable to stir two yards. In recompense, he invited Rousseau and his gouvernante to Davenport Hall: he would send horses for the four-wheeled chaise that was already there. However, it was May 4 before he put this down on paper. In the meantime, his absence from Wootton was unexplained.

  Rousseau determined to leave. Perhaps he now included Davenport among his foes. A more plausible theory is that his decision was precipitated by another row between Le Vasseur and the nurse. Relations with the servants had finally imploded just when the exiles were relying on Davenport’s presence to impose order. In a note to his niece Mary Dewes, ten days later, Bernard Granville was under the impression that the servants had driven the exiles away, even naming the guilty woman.

  Mr. Rousseau left last week, went for London, but I think he purposed making Chiswick the place of his abode for the summer. Mrs. Cowper, Mr. Davenport’s housekeeper, behaved in so brutish a manner to him that it occasioned his sudden departure from this country—a sad loss to me; I would fain have had him come and stay at Calwich, but could not prevail. If chance should bring him your way, tell him how I mourn the loss of such a neighbour.

  That problems with the servants triggered their departure is indicated from the opening of the note Rousseau left for Davenport, written on April 30. It started abrasively, but was by no means the blistering tirade commonly reported.

  First, he rebuked Davenport for allowing his servants to mistreat his two foreign guests. As master of the house, he should have known what was going on at Wootton Hall, particularly as it involved his hospitality to strangers. If he did not know, he was at fault; it would be even worse if he had known and did nothing about it.

  But Davenport’s least excusable fault was forgetting his pledge to come to Wootton, establishing himself at Davenport Hall without bothering to consider the state of the man awaiting him. That was unbearable. “Tomorrow, Sir, I leave your house.”

  I am not ignorant of the ambushes which threaten me, nor of my powerlessness in protecting myself from them. It only remains for me to finish with courage a career passed with honour. It is easy to oppress me, but it is difficult to degrade me. That is what reassures me against the dangers I will run.

  There was also a practical component to the letter. Their few household effects, plus the proceeds of the sale of Rousseau’s engravings and books, would serve as security for their expenses since December. He warmly thanked Davenport for his noble hospitality and said if it had finished as it had begun, he would have carried away the most tender and everlasting memories. “I will often regret the dwelling I am leaving, but I will regret much more having had so amiable a host, and not having been able to make him a friend.”

  The rush to depart is shown by his adding P.S.’s, about what they were leaving behind: three full trunks with the keys in; books for Dutens “on the commode in the little room,” some not worth selling but others would compensate for them; some botanical works and a collection of music that Phoebe Davenport “will find excellent if she cultivates that art and that I ask her to keep in memory of me.” Finally, he remembered to say he had put Davenport’s books in a chest.

  Rousseau, Le Vasseur, and Sultan then disappeared, traveling with the minimum of baggage and barely enough to pay their way with postboys, innkeepers, and coachmen on the long journey that lay ahead, a 150-mile haul across the heart of England, over the flat terrain of the east Midlands, into the wetlands of Lincolnshire. The Ashbourne postboy was dubious: should not Mr. Rousseau wait for his landlord, Richard Davenport, to discuss this arduous trek into strange territory? There was no question of it.

  Beforehand, Rousseau had discarded several gowns, which he dispersed in the village among the poor. Hume and Walpole both record him as no longer wearing his Armenian costume, maybe with the idea of traveling incognito. He was in “an old French dress.” Perhaps, in divesting himself of the costume of exile, Rousseau was also consciously breaking with the recent past. Later, Hume could not resist a sour quip to Blair: he had not left all his baggage—he did, after all, take Le Vasseur.

  Meanwhile, on May 2, Hume, unaware of Rousseau’s movements, supplied Davenport with an update on the administration of Rousseau’s pension. “I hope he will enjoy this mark of His Majesty’s bounty with tranquillity and peace of mind.” Davenport replied with details of Rousseau’s departure, prompting an “I told you so” from Hume. “I cannot say I am the least surprised. … So you are a traitor, too, it seems; pray, do you speak in your sleep?” Later, he said to Mme de Boufflers—wrongly—that Rousseau had accused Davenport of being Hume’s accomplice in the plot against him.

  Granville was not alone in supposing London to be Rousseau’s objective. Davenport supposed so, too. Having discovered his philosopher had flown, he made inquiries at Rousseau’s bankers in the City of London and with the pastor of the Swiss church in Soho, to whom Rousseau had contributed money for the relief of Geneva. Hume told Davenport that though Rousseau was probably already in the capital (doubtless to publish his damaging memoirs), “I fancy he dares not approach a house in which he expects to meet with me.”

  Nothing is known about Rousseau’s life in those few days of May 1767. The first news we have of the runaways after they left Wootton on May 1 is an extraordinary letter from Rousseau to the lord chancellor, Lord Camden, dated “A Spalding in Lincoshire (sic) le 5 May 1767,” in which Rousseau put himself under the protection of the first minister of the law. He was, he told Camden, detained in Spalding by the impossibility of traveling on alone without danger, and sought an official guide to conduct them at his own expense directly to Dover. Camden’s secretary replied on his behalf that the least postboy could shepherd him without the need for extra security measures.

  The drive across England had clearly exacerbated Rousseau’s paranoia. But why did he toil all the way to Spalding?

  There are two significant facts from which Rousseau’s objective and hence his itinerary can be conjectured. One is his plan to entrust his papers to Jean-François-Maximilian Cerjat, whose home was in Louth, to the north of Spalding. The other is that between Louth and Spalding is the east-coast port of Boston.

  The most likely sequence of events is that from Wootton Rousseau headed straight to Louth, either to deliver his papers for Cerjat to send on or else to pick them up if Cerjat had them already. From there, Rousseau traveled the short distance to Boston. In Boston, he discovered that there were no ships for France and concluded that his enemies had stopped them to entrap him. Only at this point did he determine to go to Dover, pausing in a state of panic at the first substantial town toward the south coast, Spalding, to request his escort.

  IN 1767, SPALDING was a trading center, the conduit for exports, such as corn and cole seed, and for various imports including timber. Its population was barely three thousand. The river Welland flows through the town. In that year, its waters were swollen by torrential rain.

  Driving into the town across the flat landscape of the Fens, past the wind engines or watermills draining off water from the surrounding farms, Rousseau, Le Vasseur, and Sultan headed for lodgings in the White Hart, crossing the marketplace, with its pillory known locally as White Willey, and passing under the arch dividing the two wings of the inn. Two centuries earlier, Mary Queen of Scots had occupied a room in the White Hart—not necessarily a good precedent.

  Well within living memory, in nearby Peterborough, a mother and daughter had been burned as witches for causing bad weather. The sudden appearance of the small, dark Swiss and his French housekeeper might have roused an ugly reception from Spalding’s townsfolk. However, its provincial gentry were not ignorant of the outside world. For improving conversation, they could resort to the Gen
tlemen’s Society, which boasted of members “in every branch of knowledge.” If Rousseau had been invited in, he might have spotted Hume’s History among the recently acquired books.

  For the Society’s members, Rousseau’s arrival must have been a sensational talking point: the news soon reached London. The president was the vicar of Spalding parish church, forty-three-year-old John Dinham. He had been educated at Eton and Cambridge, was an avid reader, and was well connected. A family man, he wore a ring on which was a tiny portrait of his wife. He was a close friend of William Fitzherbert, the M.P. (and now lord of trade) who had been Rousseau’s original link to Davenport. Fitzherbert had also been involved in settling the pension.

  Much later in the year, Hume reported to Adam Smith a conversation between Dinham and Fitzherbert in which the vicar described how “he had passed several hours a day with Rousseau; that he was cheerful, good-humoured, easy, and enjoyed himself perfectly well, without the least complaint of any kind.” At the time, Hume painted a somewhat different picture to Davenport, who had been desperately trying to locate his missing tenant.

  It had taken a while to track Rousseau down. It was not until May 11 that he addressed his former landlord in what, charitably interpreted, was a grudging expression of affection and gratitude, though expressed with his usual directness and honesty: “I preferred liberty to a residence in your house. But I infinitely prefer a residence in your house to any other form of captivity, and I prefer every other kind of captivity to that in which I am, which is horrible and unendurable.”

  Postal delays meant that Davenport did not receive this note until May 18. His generosity and sympathy were undiminished. Having expressed his amazement at Rousseau’s speaking of Wootton as captivity, he wrote to his erstwhile guest that he was sending a boy over with twenty guineas. Rousseau should hire a carriage and come back to Wootton. “I was never at Spalding, but I have always understood it to be one of the most cursed disagreeable places in England. … For God’s sake return out of it as soon as you can.” On the same day, he informed Hume that Rousseau had resurfaced: “I was quite moved to read his mournful epistle. … Poor Rousseau writes of nothing but his misery, illness, afflictions; in a word, of his being the most unfortunate man that ever existed.”