A Place in the Country

by W. G. Sebald

  A number of these visitors, too, carved their initials or the date of their visits with a penknife in the doorjambs and window seat of the Rousseau room, and as one runs a finger along these grooves in the wood, one wishes one could know who they were and what has become of them.

  In the course of our own century, now nearing its end, this Rousseau mania has gradually abated. At any rate, in the few days I spent on the island—during which time I passed not a few hours sitting by the window in the Rousseau room—among the tourists who come over to the island on a day trip for a stroll or a bite to eat, only two strayed into this room with its sparse furnishings—a settee, a bed, a table, and a chair—and even those two, evidently disappointed at how little there was to see, soon left again. Not one of them bent down to look at the glass display case to try to decipher Rousseau’s handwriting, nor noticed the way that the bleached deal floorboards, almost two feet wide, are so worn down in the middle of the room as to form a shallow depression, nor that in places the knots in the wood protrude by almost an inch. No one ran a hand over the stone basin worn smooth by age in the antechamber, or noticed the smell of soot which still lingers in the fireplace, or paused to look out of the window with its view across the orchard and a meadow to the island’s southern shore. For me, though, as I sat in Rousseau’s room, it was as if I had been transported back to an earlier age, an illusion I could indulge in all the more readily inasmuch as the island still retained that same quality of silence, undisturbed by even the most distant sound of a motor vehicle, as was still to be found everywhere in the world a century or two ago. Toward evening, especially, when the day-trippers had returned home, the island was immersed in a stillness such as is scarcely now to be found anywhere in the orbit of our civilized world, and where nothing moved, save perhaps the leaves of the mighty poplars in the breezes which sometimes stirred along the edge of the lake. The paths strewn with a fine limestone gravel grew ever brighter as I walked along them in the gathering dusk, past fenced-in meadows, past a pale motionless field of oats, a vineyard, and a vintner’s hut, up to the terrace at the edge of the beech wood already black with night, from where I watched the lights go on one after another on the opposite shore. The darkness seemed to rise out of the lake, and for a moment as I stood there gazing down into it, an image arose in my mind which somewhat resembled a color plate in an old natural history book and which—though more precise and more attractive by far than any such colored print—revealed numerous fish of the lake as they hung sleeping in the deep currents between the dark walls of water, above and behind each other, larger and smaller ones, roach and rudd, bleaks and barbels, char and trout, dace and minnows, catfish, zander and pike and tench and graylings and crucian carp.

  When Rousseau fled to the Île Saint-Pierre in the autumn of 1765, he was already on the verge of utter physical and mental exhaustion. Between 1751 and 1761, in his fifth decade and in ever more precarious health, he had, first in Paris and then in the Ermitage at Montmorency, committed to paper thousands upon thousands of pages. The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, which earned him the prize of the Académie de Dijon; the treatise On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men; the opera Le Devin du village; the letters on French music and on Providence, to Voltaire and to D’Alembert; the fairy tale La Reine fantasque; the novel La Nouvelle Héloïse; Émile and The Social Contract—all this and more was written during this period alongside the extremely copious correspondence which Rousseau always maintained. When one considers the extent and diversity of this creative output, one can only assume that Rousseau must have spent the entire time hunched over his desk in an attempt to capture, in endless sequences of lines and letters, the thoughts and feelings incessantly welling up within him. Scarcely had he reached the apogee of literary fame for his passionate epistolatory novel proclaiming the natural rights of lovers, than the state of nervous exhaustion resulting from this manic productivity was further exacerbated when Émile and The Social Contract were banned and confiscated by the parlement in Paris, thus making of the celebrated author an outcast, ostracized and banished from France on pain of arrest. Nor does Rousseau fare any better in his native city of Geneva. Here, too, he is condemned as a godless and seditious person, and his writings consigned to the flames. Looking back on this time when fate turned against him, Rousseau writes in 1770, at the beginning of the last book of his Confessions: “Here commences the work of darkness, in which, for eight years past, I have been entombed, without ever having been able, in spite of all my efforts, to penetrate its frightful obscurity. In the abyss of misfortune in which I am submerged, I feel the … blows which are directed against me. I perceive their immediate instrument, but I cannot see either the hand which guides them or the means which it employs. Shame and misfortune fall upon me as if of themselves, and unawares.” A temporary refuge is vouchsafed him only when he reaches Neuchâtel, a territory under Prussian rule and governed by Lord Marischal George Keith, where Rousseau’s admirer, Madame Boy de la Tour, places at his disposal a vacant farmhouse in Môtiers, in the remote Val de Travers. The first winter Rousseau passes there is one of the coldest of the century. The first snows fall in October. Despite his chronic abdominal complaints and the various other illnesses and ailments which plague him, from this inhospitable exile Rousseau defends himself as best he can against the incessant allegations which the Geneva Council and the clergy of Neuchâtel lay at his door. From time to time the darkness appears to lift a little. Rousseau pays calls on his protector, Lord Keith, whose ménage includes the Kalmuck Stéfan, the negro Motcho, Ibrahim the Tartar, and Ermentulla, a Muslim woman from Armenia. In this tolerant environment the persecuted philosopher, who at this period has already taken to wearing his infamous Armenian garb, a kind of kaftan and fur bonnet, appears not in the least incongruous. Moreover, he is at pains to accommodate himself with Georges de Montmollin, the pastor in Môtiers, going to mass and communion; he sits in front of the house in the sun occupying himself with the weaving of silk ribbons and goes botanizing along the valley and in the alpine pastures. “Il me semble,” he writes later in the Rêveries, “que sous les ombrages d’une forêt je suis oublié, libre et paisible comme si je n’avais plus d’ennemis.” The enemies, meanwhile, were not idle. Rousseau sees himself obliged to write a letter in his own defense to the Archbishop of Paris, and a year later the pamphlet Lettres de la montagne, in which he demonstrates how the Geneva Council’s proceedings against him offend against both the constitution of that Republic and its liberal traditions. Voltaire, orchestrating the campaign against Rousseau from behind the scenes in an unholy alliance with the self-righteous representatives of the classe vénérable, responded to this missive with a pamphlet entitled Le Sentiment des citoyens, in which, having failed to send Rousseau to the scaffold, he attempts to denounce him as a charlatan and a blasphemous liar. He does this not under his own name but anonymously, in the style of a fanatical Calvinist minister. Full of shame and sorrow—thus the pamphlet—one is forced to the conclusion that in Rousseau, one is dealing with a man who still bears the deadly marks of his debauchery, and in the costume of a traveling showman drags with him from town to town and mountaintop to mountaintop the wretched woman whose mother he sent to an early grave and whose children he abandoned at the door of the foundlings’ home, thereby not only forswearing any natural feeling but at the same time divesting himself of all honor and religion. It is not immediately clear why Voltaire, who in the course of his career did not otherwise notably distinguish himself as a defender of the true faith, should have taken up the cause against Rousseau with such vehemence, nor why he should have hounded him so relentlessly and with such venom. The only possible explanation seems to be that he was unable to come to terms with his own fame being eclipsed by the light of this new star in the literary firmament. Few things are as immutable as the vindictiveness with which writers talk about their literary colleagues behind their backs. But however such matters may have stood at the time, Voltaire’s public in
vective and his scheming behind the scenes finally resulted in Rousseau’s having to leave the Val de Travers. When the Marquise de Verdelin visited him in Môtiers in early September 1765 and attended a Sunday service there, Montmollin, who for a while at least had been favorably disposed toward Rousseau but had increasingly come under the influence of his colleagues from Neuchâtel and Geneva, delivered a sermon on the verse in Proverbs 15 which states that the participation of the wicked in the sacrifice of the Lord is an abomination. Not even the simplest soul among the faithful present that day in the church at Môtiers could have been in any doubt as to who this inflammatory sermon was aimed at. It is scarcely surprising, then, that henceforth whenever Rousseau appeared on the street he was sworn at and mobbed by the angry villagers, and that the same night, stones were hurled at the gallery and thrown through the windows of his house. Rousseau writes later, in the Confessions, that at the time in the Val de Travers he was treated like a rabid wolf and that, passing one of the scattered cottages, he would sometimes hear one of the peasants call out, “Fetch me my gun so that I can take a shot at him.”

  Compared to these dark days, the Île Saint-Pierre must truly have appeared to Rousseau, when he arrived there on the ninth of September, as a paradise in miniature in which he might believe he could collect himself in a stillness, as he writes at the beginning of the fifth Promenade, interrupted only by the cry of the eagle, the song of an occasional bird, and the rushing of the mountain streams. During his stay on the island, Rousseau was provided for by the steward Gabriel Engel and his wife, Salome, who managed the farmstead with a few servants and were later reprimanded by the Berne Council for having unquestioningly taken in the refugee without further ado. Nonetheless, Rousseau was hardly as solitary on the island in September and October 1765 as the fifth Promenade would have us believe. As in Môtiers, here, too, he was subject to the attentions of a steady stream of visitors, from whom he frequently found himself obliged to escape via the trapdoor which is still to be seen in his room to this day. Nor were the months of the harvest, during which large numbers of people from Bienne and its surroundings were employed on the island, quite such a peaceful time as Rousseau might in retrospect have believed. Nevertheless we can easily understand how, after all he had had to endure in Môtiers, he could believe that he could easily spend two years, two centuries, or all of eternity on the island in the care of the Engels. That at least is almost exactly how I felt when, returning at dusk from my walk on the first evening of my stay, I sat alone in the dining room of the hotel. Outside, night had fallen, and inside I was lapped in the warm glow of a lamp and looked after most attentively by the patron himself, who came over to my table from time to time to see whether everything was in order and whether there was anything further I desired. This patron, one Herr Regli, who that evening was wearing an apricot-colored suit and appeared almost to glide through the rooms, seemed to me the very model of courtesy and consideration, and my admiration for him was complete when I later heard him say on the telephone, as he sat in his little office, yes, yes, of course he was still there, vous me connaissez, toujours fidèle au poste.

  Nor was there any letup for Rousseau, during his stay on the island, in the daily business of writing, even if he claimed, in the fifth Promenade, to have sought to extricate himself from it by any means possible. Apart from his ceaseless correspondence, during these weeks he was occupied with the editing of his Projet de constitution pour la Corse, not published until almost one hundred years later, which he wrote down in two small notebooks today preserved in the Library of

  Geneva. The casual remark Rousseau made in The Social Contract, that it was time that a wise man by means of a draft constitution showed the Corsican people—then engaged in their struggle for independence from Genoese rule—how they might set about legislating their affairs of state, had led Captain Mathieu Buttafuoco to pay a visit to Môtiers to ask the philosopher to take this role upon himself. There was in Europe at the time a great deal of support for the Corsicans’ protest against foreign rule, and the Corsican general Pascal Paoli, the father of the fatherland, represented a lodestar for all those who longed to see a better regime. We encounter him in Hölderlin as well as in Hebel’s Alemannic poems, in which a beggar sitting by the side of the road relates: “I ha in schwarzer Wetternacht / vor Laudons Zelt und Fahne gwacht / I bi bim Paschal Paoli / in Korsika Draguner gsi” [“In darkest night, in deepest dark / I watched by Laudon’s tent and flag / I served with Pascal Paoli / with Corsican dragoons did I”]. In Rousseau’s imagination, too, the idea of Corsica takes on legendary traits from the beginning; he believed he had a premonition that “un jour cette petite île étonnera l’Europe,” even if he could not have known in what terrifying manner this prophecy was to be fulfilled within the next fifty years. He saw in Corsica the potential for putting into practice an order in which the evils of the society in which he felt himself trapped could be avoided. His aversion to urban civilization motivated him to suggest the Corsicans adopt agriculture as the only possible basis for a truly good and free life. All forms of hierarchy were to be avoided by means of a legal system administered through rural communities and based on the principle of equality, as in the cantons of central Switzerland. Above and beyond this, Rousseau went so far as to recommend (at the time when Pascal Paoli was busy establishing his own mint in Corte) that the Corsicans abolish monetary economy in favor of a system of bartering. The whole Corsica project outlined on the Île Saint-Pierre is thus a utopian dream in which bourgeois society, increasingly determined by the manufacture of goods and the accumulation of private wealth, is promised a return to more innocent times. Neither Rousseau nor those who came after him were ever able to resolve the inherent contradiction between this nostalgic utopia and the inexorable march of progress toward the brink of the abyss. The gap between our longings and our rational strategy for living is clearly illustrated by the fact that Rousseau, who at that time needed nothing more urgently than a safe haven, could not bring himself to move to Corsica. For all that the Gazette de Berne had already announced that he would be taking up the position of Governor on the Mediterranean island, if truth be told, having acquired his reputation in the salons of the eminent society of the day, he had no inclination to return to what, from his perspective, appeared as a precivilized world, in which, as he notes in the Confessions, the most basic comforts would be lacking. He is positively horrified at the prospect of crossing the Alps and having to transport with him his entire household effects—“linge, habits, vaisselle, batterie de cuisine, papier, livres,” he writes, “il fallait tout porter avec soi.” The place where he had been offered accommodation and a living was Vescovato, a small town huddled high up on one of the steep east-facing slopes of the Castagniccia. In the eighteenth century it was a place of some importance, and the Filippini house which would have been at his disposal was by no means as primitive as perhaps he feared. I visited it a few months after I had been to the Île Saint-Pierre. From the first-floor windows one looks down into a steep gorge, which even at the end of summer is alive with the sound of water. Farther away, one perceives a shimmering blue haze in which it is impossible to distinguish the sea from the sky rising above it. The town is surrounded by cultivated terraces, abandoned now, but in which at that time fruit trees flourished, oranges and apricots and various fruits of the field. In the surrounding area, covering the slopes of the hills, were groves of sweet chestnuts in whose dappled shade Rousseau could have taken the air with his dog at his side. Who can say whether, if he had spent the rest of his life there, far removed from the hubbub of literary business and hypocrisy, he might yet have retained that sense of sanity and proportion which later at times threatened to desert him altogether.