SAVOY.
The commonplace theory which the world takes for granted as to the
relations of the sexes, makes the woman ever crave the power and
guidance of her physically stronger mate. Even if this be a true account
of the normal state, there is at any rate a kind of temperament among
the many types of men, in which it seems as if the elements of character
remain mere futile and dispersive particles, until compelled into unity
and organisation by the creative shock of feminine influence. There are
men, famous or obscure, whose lives might be divided into a number of
epochs, each defined and presided over by the influence of a woman. For
the inconstant such a calendar contains many divisions, for the constant
it is brief and simple; for both alike it marks the great decisive
phases through which character has moved.
Rousseau's temperament was deeply marked by this special sort of
susceptibility in one of its least agreeable forms. His sentiment was
neither robustly and courageously animal, nor was it an intellectual
demand for the bright and vivacious sympathies in which women sometimes
excel. It had neither bold virility, nor that sociable energy which
makes close emotional companionship an essential condition of freedom of
faculty and completeness of work. There is a certain close and sickly
air round all his dealings with women and all his feeling for them. We
seem to move not in the star-like radiance of love, nor even in the
fiery flames of lust, but among the humid heats of some unknown abode of
things not wholesome or manly. "I know a sentiment," he writes, "which
is perhaps less impetuous than love, but a thousand times more
delicious, which sometimes is joined to love, and which is very often
apart from it. Nor is this sentiment friendship only; it is more
voluptuous, more tender; I do not believe that any one of the same sex
could be its object; at least I have been a friend, if ever man was, and
I never felt this about any of my friends."[38] He admits that he can
only describe this sentiment by its effects; but our lives are mostly
ruled by elements that defy definition, and in Rousseau's case the
sentiment which he could not describe was a paramount trait of his
mental constitution. It was as a voluptuous garment; in it his
imagination was cherished into activity, and protected against that
outer air of reality which braces ordinary men, but benumbs and
disintegrates the whole vital apparatus of such an organisation as
Rousseau's. If he had been devoid of this feeling about women, his
character might very possibly have remained sterile. That feeling was
the complementary contribution, without which could be no fecundity.
When he returned from his squalid Italian expedition in search of bread
and a new religion, his mind was clouded with the vague desire, the
sensual moodiness, which in such natures stains the threshold of
manhood. This unrest, with its mysterious torments and black delights,
was banished, or at least soothed into a happier humour, by the
influence of a person who is one of the most striking types to be found
in the gallery of fair women.
I.
A French writer in the eighteenth century, in a story which deals with a
rather repulsive theme of action in a tone that is graceful, simple, and
pathetic, painted the portrait of a creature for whom no moralist with a
reputation to lose can say a word; and we may, if we choose, fool
ourselves by supposing her to be without a counterpart in the
better-regulated world of real life, but, in spite of both these
objections, she is an interesting and not untouching figure to those who
like to know all the many-webbed stuff out of which their brothers and
sisters are made. The Manon Lescaut of the unfortunate Abbé Prevost,
kindly, bright, playful, tender, but devoid of the very germ of the idea
of that virtue which is counted the sovereign recommendation of woman,
helps us to understand Madame de Warens. There are differences enough
between them, and we need not mistake them for one and the same type.
Manon Lescaut is a prettier figure, because romance has fewer
limitations than real life; but if we think of her in reading of
Rousseau's benefactress, the vision of the imaginary woman tends to
soften our judgment of the actual one, as well as to enlighten our
conception of a character that eludes the instruments of a commonplace
analysis.[39]
She was born at Vevai in 1700; she married early, and early disagreed
with her husband, from whom she eventually went away, abandoning family,
religion, country, and means of subsistence, with all gaiety of heart.
The King of Sardinia happened to be keeping his court at a small town on
the southern shores of the lake of Geneva, and the conversion of Madame
de Warens to Catholicism by the preaching of the Bishop of Annecy,[40]
gave a zest to the royal visit, as being a successful piece of sport in
that great spiritual hunt which Savoy loved to pursue at the expense of
the reformed church in Switzerland. The king, to mark his zeal for the
faith of his house, conferred on the new convert a small pension for
life; but as the tongues of the scandalous imputed a less pure motive
for such generosity in a parsimonious prince, Madame de Warens removed
from the court and settled at Annecy. Her conversion was hardly more
serious than Rousseau's own, because seriousness was no condition of her
intelligence on any of its sides or in any of its relations. She was
extremely charitable to the poor, full of pity for all in misfortune,
easily moved to forgiveness of wrong or ingratitude; careless, gay,
open-hearted; having, in a word, all the good qualities which spring in
certain generous soils from human impulse, and hardly any of those which
spring from reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her
reason had been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's
stamp;[41] finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always
cold, argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he
attacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union of
the sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect indifference,
provided only that decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace of
mind of persons concerned be not disturbed.[42] This execrable lesson,
which greater and more unselfish men held and propagated in grave books
before the end of the century, took root in her mind. If we accept
Rousseau's explanation, it did so the more easily as her temperament was
cold, and thus corroborated the idea of the indifference of what public
opinion and private passion usually concur in investing with such
enormous weightiness. "I will even dare to say," Rousseau declares,
"that she only knew one true pleasure in the world, and that was to give
pleasure to those whom she loved."[43] He is at great pains to protest
how compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive
sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practical
observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxious
to prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its
energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or
volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light
or as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution like that of
Madame de Warens is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which
belongs to the other sort, but it is essentially bound up with
sensibility, or readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry from
another soul. It is the slow, brooding, smouldering nature, like
Rousseau's own, in which we may expect to find the tropics.
To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear upon a poor
soul like Madame de Warens is as if one should denounce flagrant want
of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was
incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and
confusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent
much time in search after secret elixirs and the like. "Quacks, taking
advantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantly
infested her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and
chemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms which would have made her
the delight of the best societies."[44] Perhaps, however, the too
notorious vagrancy of her amours had at least as much to do with her
failure to delight the best societies as her indiscreet passion for
alchemy. Her person was attractive enough. "She had those points of
beauty," says Rousseau, "which are desirable, because they reside rather
in expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a
soft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not
see a finer head or bosom, finer arms or hands."[45] She was full of
tricks and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup
and meats at dinner; when they were placed on the table she nearly
swooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an
hour or so she took her first morsel.[46] On the whole, if we accept the
current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so
little flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient to
people with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and
cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or
rapacious vanity.
This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was
decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain
breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738.
It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He
acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it
was, and his principles of judging them. He saw much of the lives of the
poor and of the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was
revolutionised, and the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of
grandeur, of palaces, princesses, and a glorious career full in the
world's eye, were replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life,
which never afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a front
place in the imagination of literary Europe ever since. The notions or
aspirations which he had picked up from a few books gave way to notions
and aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the scenes of actual
life into which he was thrown, and which found his character soft for
their impression. In one way the new pictures of a future were as
dissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had been, and the
sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a man to
compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world as the mental life
among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done.
Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy
was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in
him, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over
gardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. "It was
the first time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows.
Always shut in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and
the dull gray of the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty was
to me! It brightened all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted the
landscape among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if
she had brought it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in all
peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the
flowers and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingled
together in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, found
itself more free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal vent
among these orchard gardens."[47] Madame de Warens was the semi-divine
figure who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmonious
accent. He had neither transports nor desires by her side, but existed
in a state of ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing what. "I could
have passed my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without an
instant of weariness. She is the only person with whom I never felt that
dryness in conversation, which turns the duty of keeping it up into a
torment. Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an
inexhaustible stream of chatter, which never came to an end until it was
interrupted from without. I only felt all the force of my attachment for
her when she was out of my sight. So long as I could see her I was
merely happy and satisfied, but my disquiet in her absence went so far
as to be painful. I shall never forget how one holiday, while she was at
vespers, I went for a walk outside the town, my heart full of her image
and of an eager desire to pass all my days by her side. I had sense
enough to see that for the present this was impossible, and that the
bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief. This gave to my musing a
sadness which was free from everything sombre, and which was moderated
by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which has always moved me to a
singular degree, the singing of the birds, the glory of the weather, the
sweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic dwellings in which my
imagination placed our common home;--all this so struck me with a vivid,
tender, sad, and touching impression that I saw myself as in an ecstasy
transported into the happy time and the happy place where my heart,
possessed of all the felicity that could bring it delight, without even
dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share joys
inexpressible."[48]
There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful now
and this delicious future. The harshness of circumstance is ever
interposing with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen the
first of all problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submitted
to the observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens,[49] and his verdict
corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before
Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. He
pronounced that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not
thoroughly inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas,
almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that
the honour of one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of
fortune to which he had any right to aspire.[50] So he was sent to the
seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began by
conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearance
happened to be displeasing to him. A second was found,[51] and the
patient and obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of
his new teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the
progress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case
as in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness
to physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by
press of more urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly
sensuous quality retained, that he should have remembered, and thought
worth mentioning years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at
the seminary of Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of
gingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the second had the
most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair hair and
large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that he was
one of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While at
Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and benevolent
priest,[52] and uniting the two good men thirty years after he conceived
and drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar.[53]
Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil
was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in
intellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau
ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was
one of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not
only the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the
temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain local
impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the old
transports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent
Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps
of the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass,
nor a fair little abbé who played the violin in the choir.[54] Yet he
was in so dreamy, absent, and distracted a state, that neither his
good-will nor his assiduity availed, and he could learn nothing, not
even music. His teacher, one Le Mâitre, belonged to that great class of
irregular and disorderly natures with which Rousseau's destiny, in the
shape of an irregular and disorderly temperament of his own, so
constantly brought him into contact. Le Mâitre could not work without
the inspiration of the wine cup, and thus his passion for his art landed
him a sot. He took offence at a slight put upon him by the precentor of
the cathedral of which he was choir-master, and left Annecy in a furtive
manner along with Rousseau, whom the too comprehensive solicitude of
Madame de Warens despatched to bear him company. They went together as
far as Lyons; here the unfortunate musician happened to fall into an
epileptic fit in the street. Rousseau called for help, informed the
crowd of the poor man's hotel, and then seizing a moment when no one was
thinking about him, turned the street corner and finally disappeared,
the musician being thus "abandoned by the only friend on whom he had a
right to count."[55] It thus appears that a man maybe exquisitely moved
by the sound of bells, the song of birds, the fairness of smiling
gardens, and yet be capable all the time without a qualm of misgiving of
leaving a friend senseless in the road in a strange place. It has ceased
to be wonderful how many ugly and cruel actions are done by people with
an extraordinary sense of the beauty and beneficence of nature. At the
moment Rousseau only thought of getting back to Annecy and Madame de
Warens. "It is not," he says in words of profound warning, which many
men have verified in those two or three hours before the tardy dawn that
swell into huge purgatorial æons,--"it is not when we have just done a
bad action, that it torments us; it is when we recall it long after, for
the memory of it can never be thrust out."[56]
II.
When he made his way homewards again, he found to his surprise and
dismay that his benefactress had left Annecy, and had gone for an
indefinite time to Paris. He never knew the secret of this sudden
departure, for no man, he says, was ever so little curious as to the
private affairs of his friends. His heart, completely occupied with the
present, filled its whole capacity and entire space with that, and
except for past pleasures no empty corner was ever left for what was
done with.[57] He says he was too young to take the desertion deeply to
heart. Where he found subsistence we do not know. He was fascinated by a
flashy French adventurer,[58] in whose company he wasted many hours, and
the precious stuff of youthful opportunity. He passed a summer day in
joyful rustic fashion with two damsels whom he hardly ever saw again,
but the memory of whom and of the holiday that they had made with him
remained stamped in his brain, to be reproduced many a year hence in
some of the traits of the new Heloïsa and her friend Claire.[59] Then he
accepted an invitation from a former waiting-woman of Madame de Warens
to attend her home to Freiburg. On this expedition he paid an hour's
visit to his father, who had settled and remarried at Nyon. Returning
from Freiburg, he came to Lausanne, where, with an audacity that might
be taken for the first presage of mental disturbance, he undertook to
teach music. "I have already," he says, "noted some moments of
inconceivable delirium, in which I ceased to be myself. Behold me now a
teacher of singing, without knowing how to decipher an air. Without the
least knowledge of composition, I boasted of my skill in it before all
the world; and without ability to score the slenderest vaudeville, I
gave myself out for a composer. Having been presented to M. de
Treytorens, a professor of law, who loved music and gave concerts at his
house, I insisted on giving him a specimen of my talent, and I set to
work to compose a piece for his concert with as much effrontery as if I
knew all about it." The performance came off duly, and the strange
impostor conducted it with as much gravity as the profoundest master.
Never since the beginning of opera has the like charivari greeted the
ears of men.[60] Such an opening was fatal to all chance of scholars,
but the friendly tavern-keeper who had first taken him in did not lack
either hope or charity. "How is it," Rousseau cried, many years after
this, "that having found so many good people in my youth, I find so few
in my advanced life? Is their stock exhausted? No; but the class in
which I have to seek them now is not the same as that in which I found
them then. Among the common people, where great passions only speak at
intervals, the sentiments of nature make themselves heard oftener. In
the higher ranks they are absolutely stifled, and under the mask of
sentiment it is only interest or vanity that speaks."[61]
From Lausanne he went to Neuchâtel, where he had more success, for,
teaching others, he began himself to learn. But no success was marked
enough to make him resist a vagrant chance. One day in his rambles
falling in with an archimandrite of the Greek church, who was traversing
Europe in search of subscriptions for the restoration of the Holy
Sepulchre, he at once attached himself to him in the capacity of
interpreter. In this position he remained for a few weeks, until the
French minister at Soleure took him away from the Greek monk, and
despatched him to Paris to be the attendant of a young officer.[62] A
few days in the famous city, which he now saw for the first time, and
which disappointed his expectations just as the sea and all other
wonders disappointed them,[63] convinced him that here was not what he
sought, and he again turned his face southwards in search of Madame de
Warens and more familiar lands.
The interval thus passed in roaming over the eastern face of France, and
which we may date in the summer of 1732,[64] was always counted by
Rousseau among the happy epochs of his life, though the weeks may seem
grievously wasted to a generation which is apt to limit its ideas of
redeeming the time to the two pursuits of reading books or making money.
He travelled alone and on foot from Soleure to Paris and from Paris back
again to Lyons, and this was part of the training which served him in
the stead of books. Scarcely any great writer since the revival of
letters has been so little literary as Rousseau, so little indebted to
literature for the most characteristic part of his work. He was formed
by life; not by life in the sense of contact with a great number of
active and important persons, or with a great number of persons of any
kind, but in the rarer sense of free surrender to the plenitude of his
own impressions. A world composed of such people, all dispensing with
the inherited portion of human experience, and living independently on
their own stock, would rapidly fall backwards into dissolution. But
there is no more rash idea of the right composition of a society than
one which leads us to denounce a type of character for no better reason
than that, if it were universal, society would go to pieces. There is
very little danger of Rousseau's type becoming common, unless lunar or
other great physical influences arise to work a vast change in the
cerebral constitution of the species. We may safely trust the prodigious
_vis inertioe_ of human nature to ward off the peril of an eccentricity
beyond bounds spreading too far. At present, however, it is enough,
without going into the general question, to notice the particular fact
that while the other great exponents of the eighteenth century movement,
Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, were nourishing their natural strength of
understanding by the study and practice of literature, Rousseau, the
leader of the reaction against that movement, was wandering a beggar and
an outcast, craving the rude fare of the peasant's hut, knocking at
roadside inns, and passing nights in caves and holes in the fields, or
in the great desolate streets of towns.
If such a life had been disagreeable to him, it would have lost all the
significance that it now has for us. But where others would have found
affliction, he had consolation, and where they would have lain desperate
and squalid, he marched elate and ready to strike the stars. "Never," he
says, "did I think so much, exist so much, be myself so much, as in the
journeys that I have made alone and on foot. Walking has something about
it which animates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think while I am
still; my body must be in motion, to move my mind. The sight of the
country, the succession of agreeable views, open air, good appetite, the
freedom of the alehouse, the absence of everything that could make me
feel dependence, or recall me to my situation--all this sets my soul
free, gives me a greater boldness of thought. I dispose of all nature as
its sovereign lord; my heart, wandering from object to object, mingles
and is one with the things that soothe it, wraps itself up in charming
images, and is intoxicated by delicious sentiment. Ideas come as they
please, not as I please: they do not come at all, or they come in a
crowd, overwhelming me with their number and their force. When I came to
a place I only thought of eating, and when I left it I only thought of
walking. I felt that a new paradise awaited me at the door, and I
thought of nothing but of hastening in search of it."[65]
Here again is a picture of one whom vagrancy assuredly did not
degrade:--"I had not the least care for the future, and I awaited the
answer [as to the return of Madame de Warens to Savoy], lying out in the
open air, sleeping stretched out on the ground or on some wooden bench,
as tranquilly as on a bed of roses. I remember passing one delicious
night outside the town [Lyons], in a road which ran by the side of
either the Rhone or the Saône, I forget which of the two. Gardens raised
on a terrace bordered the other side of the road. It had been very hot
all day, and the evening was delightful; the dew moistened the parched
grass, the night was profoundly still, the air fresh without being cold;
the sun in going down had left red vapours in the heaven, and they
turned the water to rose colour; the trees on the terrace sheltered
nightingales, answering song for song. I went on in a sort of ecstasy,
surrendering my heart and every sense to the enjoyment of it all, and
only sighing for regret that I was enjoying it alone. Absorbed in the
sweetness of my musing, I prolonged my ramble far into the night,
without ever perceiving that I was tired. At last I found it out. I lay
down luxuriously on the shelf of a niche or false doorway made in the
wall of the terrace; the canopy of my bed was formed by overarching
tree-tops; a nightingale was perched exactly over my head, and I fell
asleep to his singing. My slumber was delicious, my awaking more
delicious still. It was broad day, and my opening eyes looked on sun and
water and green things, and an adorable landscape. I rose up and gave
myself a shake; I felt hungry and started gaily for the town, resolved
to spend on a good breakfast the two pieces of money which I still had
left. I was in such joyful spirits that I went along the road singing
lustily."[66]
There is in this the free expansion of inner sympathy; the natural
sentiment spontaneously responding to all the delicious movement of the
external world on its peaceful and harmonious side, just as if the world
of many-hued social circumstance which man has made for himself had no
existence. We are conscious of a full nervous elation which is not the
product of literature, such as we have seen so many a time since, and
which only found its expression in literature in Rousseau's case by
accident. He did not feel in order to write, but felt without any
thought of writing. He dreamed at this time of many lofty destinies,
among them that of marshal of France, but the fame of authorship never
entered into his dreams. When the time for authorship actually came,
his work had all the benefit of the absence of self-consciousness, it
had all the disinterestedness, so to say, with which the first fresh
impressions were suffered to rise in his mind.
One other picture of this time is worth remembering, as showing that
Rousseau was not wholly blind to social circumstances, and as
illustrating, too, how it was that his way of dealing with them was so
much more real and passionate, though so much less sagacious in some of
its aspects, than the way of the other revolutionists of the century.
One day, when he had lost himself in wandering in search of some site
which he expected to find beautiful, he entered the house of a peasant,
half dead with hunger and thirst. His entertainer offered him nothing
more restoring than coarse barley bread and skimmed milk. Presently,
after seeing what manner of guest he had, the worthy man descended by a
small trap into his cellar, and brought up some good brown bread, some
meat, and a bottle of wine, and an omelette was added afterwards. Then
he explained to the wondering Rousseau, who was a Swiss, and knew none
of the mysteries of the French fisc, that he hid away his wine on
account of the duties, and his bread on account of the _taille_, and
declared that he would be a ruined man if they suspected that he was not
dying of hunger. All this made an impression on Rousseau which he never
forgot. "Here," he says, "was the germ of the inextinguishable hatred
which afterwards grew up in my heart against the vexations that harass
the common people, and against all their oppressors. This man actually
did not dare to eat the bread which he had won by the sweat of his brow,
and only avoided ruin by showing the same misery as reigned
around him."[67]
It was because he had thus seen the wrongs of the poor, not from without
but from within, not as a pitying spectator but as of their own company,
that Rousseau by and by brought such fire to the attack upon the old
order, and changed the blank practice of the elder philosophers into a
deadly affair of ball and shell. The man who had been a servant, who had
wanted bread, who knew the horrors of the midnight street, who had slept
in dens, who had been befriended by rough men and rougher women, who saw
the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside, and who above all
never tried to shut these things out from his memory, but accepted them
as the most interesting, the most touching, the most real of all his
experiences, might well be expected to penetrate to the root of the
matter, and to protest to the few who usurp literature and policy with
their ideas, aspirations, interests, that it is not they but the many,
whose existence stirs the heart and fills the eye with the great prime
elements of the human lot.
III.
It was, then, some time towards the middle of 1732 that Rousseau arrived
at Chambéri, and finally took up his residence with Madame de Warens, in
the dullest and most sombre room of a dull and sombre house. She had
procured him employment in connection with a land survey which the
government of Charles Emmanuel III. was then executing. It was only
temporary, and Rousseau's function was no loftier than that of clerk,
who had to copy and reduce arithmetical calculations. We may imagine how
little a youth fresh from nights under the summer sky would relish eight
hours a day of surly toil in a gloomy office, with a crowd of dirty and
ill-smelling fellow-workers.[68] If Rousseau was ever oppressed by any
set of circumstances, his method was invariable: he ran away from them.
So now he threw up his post, and again tried to earn a little money by
that musical instruction in which he had made so many singular and
grotesque endeavours. Even here the virtues which make ordinary life a
possible thing were not his. He was pleased at his lessons while there,
but he could not bear the idea of being bound to be there, nor the
fixing of an hour. In time this experiment for a subsistence came to the
same end as all the others. He next rushed to Besançon in search of the
musical instruction which he wished to give to others, but his baggage
was confiscated at the frontier, and he had to return.[69] Finally he
abandoned the attempt, and threw himself loyally upon the narrow
resources of Madame de Warens, whom he assisted in some singularly
indefinite way in the transaction of her very indefinite and
miscellaneous affairs,--if we are here, as so often, to give the name of
affairs to a very rapid and heedless passage along a shabby road
to ruin.
The household at this time was on a very remarkable footing. Madame de
Warens was at its head, and Claude Anet, gardener, butler, steward, was
her factotum. He was a discreet person, of severe probity and few words,
firm, thrifty, and sage. The too comprehensive principles of his
mistress admitted him to the closest intimacy, and in due time, when
Madame de Warens thought of the seductions which ensnare the feet of
youth, Rousseau was delivered from them in an equivocal way by
solicitous application of the same maxims of comprehension. "Although
Claude Anet was as young as she was, he was so mature and so grave, that
he looked upon us as two children worthy of indulgence, and we both
looked upon him as a respectable man, whose esteem it was our business
to conciliate. Thus there grew up between us three a companionship,
perhaps without another example like it upon earth. All our wishes, our
cares, our hearts were in common; nothing seemed to pass outside our
little circle. The habit of living together, and of living together
exclusively, became so strong that if at our meals one of the three was
absent, or there came a fourth, all was thrown out; and in spite of our
peculiar relations, a _tête-à-tête_ was less sweet than a meeting of all
three."[70] Fate interfered to spoil this striking attempt after a new
type of the family, developed on a duandric base. Claude Anet was seized
with illness, a consequence of excessive fatigue in an Alpine expedition
in search of plants, and he came to his end.[71] In him Rousseau always
believed that he lost the most solid friend he ever possessed, "a rare
and estimable man, in whom nature served instead of education, and who
nourished in obscure servitude all the virtues of great men."[72] The
day after his death, Rousseau was speaking of their lost friend to
Madame de Warens with the liveliest and most sincere affliction, when
suddenly in the midst of the conversation he remembered that he should
inherit the poor man's clothes, and particularly a handsome black coat.
A reproachful tear from his Maman, as he always somewhat nauseously
called Madame de Warens, extinguished the vile thought and washed away
its last traces.[73] After all, those men and women are exceptionally
happy, who have no such involuntary meanness of thought standing against
themselves in that unwritten chapter of their lives which even the most
candid persons keep privately locked up in shamefast recollection.
Shortly after his return to Chambéri, a wave from the great tide of
European affairs surged into the quiet valleys of Savoy. In the February
of 1733, Augustus the Strong died, and the usual disorder followed in
the choice of a successor to him in the kingship of Poland. France was
for Stanislaus, the father-in-law of Lewis XV., while the Emperor
Charles VI. and Anne of Russia were for August III., elector of Saxony.
Stanislaus was compelled to flee, and the French Government, taking up
his quarrel, declared war against the Emperor (October 14, 1733). The
first act of this war, which was to end in the acquisition of Naples and
the two Sicilies by Spanish Bourbons, and of Lorraine by France, was the
despatch of a French expedition to the Milanese under Marshall Villars,
the husband of one of Voltaire's first idols. This took place in the
autumn of 1733, and a French column passed through Chambéri, exciting
lively interest in all minds, including Rousseau's. He now read the
newspapers for the first time, with the most eager sympathy for the
country with whose history his own name was destined to be so
permanently associated. "If this mad passion," he says, "had only been
momentary, I should not speak of it; but for no visible reason it took
such root in my heart, that when I afterwards at Paris played the stern
republican, I could not help feeling in spite of myself a secret
predilection for the very nation that I found so servile, and the
government I made bold to assail."[74] This fondness for France was
strong, constant, and invincible, and found what was in the eighteenth
century a natural complement in a corresponding dislike of England.[75]
Rousseau's health began to show signs of weakness. His breath became
asthmatic, he had palpitations, he spat blood, and suffered from a slow
feverishness from which he never afterwards became entirely free.[76]
His mind was as feverish as his body, and the morbid broodings which
active life reduces to their lowest degree in most young men, were left
to make full havoc along with the seven devils of idleness and vacuity.
An instinct which may flow from the unrecognised animal lying deep down
in us all, suggested the way of return to wholesomeness. Rousseau
prevailed upon Madame de Warens to leave the stifling streets for the
fresh fields, and to deliver herself by retreat to rural solitude from
the adventurers who made her their prey. Les Charmettes, the modest
farm-house to which they retired, still stands. The modern traveller,
with a taste for relieving an imagination strained by great historic
monuments and secular landmarks, with the sight of spots associated with
the passion and meditation of some far-shining teacher of men, may walk
a short league from where the gray slate roofs of dull Chambéri bake in
the sun, and ascending a gently mounting road, with high leafy bank on
the right throwing cool shadows over his head, and a stream on the left
making music at his feet, he sees an old red housetop lifted lonely
above the trees. The homes in which men have lived now and again lend
themselves to the beholder's subjective impression; they seemed to be
brooding in forlorn isolation like some life-wearied gray-beard over
ancient and sorrow-stricken memories. At Les Charmettes a pitiful
melancholy penetrates you. The supreme loveliness of the scene, the
sweet-smelling meadows, the orchard, the water-ways, the little vineyard
with here and there a rose glowing crimson among the yellow stunted
vines, the rust-red crag of the Nivolet rising against the sky far
across the broad valley; the contrast between all this peace, beauty,
silence, and the diseased miserable life of the famous man who found a
scanty span of paradise in the midst of it, touches the soul with a
pathetic spell. We are for the moment lifted out of squalor, vagrancy,
and disorder, and seem to hear some of the harmonies which sounded to
this perturbed spirit, soothing it, exalting it, and stirring those
inmost vibrations which in truth make up all the short divine part of a
man's life.[77]
"No day passes," he wrote in the very year in which he died, "in which
I do not recall with joy and tender effusion this single and brief time
in my life, when I was fully myself, without mixture or hindrance, and
when I may say in a true sense that I lived. I may almost say, like the
prefect when disgraced and proceeding to end his days tranquilly in the
country, 'I have passed seventy years on the earth, and I have lived but
seven of them.' But for this brief and precious space, I should perhaps
have remained uncertain about myself; for during all the rest of my life
I have been so agitated, tossed, plucked hither and thither by the
passions of others, that, being nearly passive in a life so stormy, I
should find it hard to distinguish what belonged to me in my own
conduct,--to such a degree has harsh necessity weighed upon me. But
during these few years I did what I wished to do, I was what I wished to
be."[78] The secret of such rare felicity is hardly to be described in
words. It was the ease of a profoundly sensuous nature with every sense
gratified and fascinated. Caressing and undivided affection within
doors, all the sweetness and movement of nature without, solitude,
freedom, and the busy idleness of life in gardens,--these were the
conditions of Rousseau's ideal state. "If my happiness," he says, in
language of strange felicity, "consisted in facts, actions, or words, I
might then describe and represent it in some way; but how say what was
neither said nor done nor even thought, but only enjoyed and felt
without my being able to point to any other object of my happiness than
the very feeling itself? I arose with the sun and I was happy; I went
out of doors and I was happy; I saw Maman and I was happy; I left her
and I was happy; I went among the woods and hills, I wandered about in
the dells, I read, I was idle, I dug in the garden, I gathered fruit, I
helped them indoors, and everywhere happiness followed me. It was not in
any given thing, it was all in myself, and could never leave me for a
single instant."[79] This was a true garden of Eden, with the serpent in
temporary quiescence, and we may count the man rare since the fall who
has found such happiness in such conditions, and not less blessed than
he is rare. The fact that he was one of this chosen company was among
the foremost of the circumstances which made Rousseau seem to so many
men in the eighteenth century as a spring of water in a thirsty land.
All innocent and amiable things moved him. He used to spend hours
together in taming pigeons; he inspired them with such confidence that
they would follow him about, and allow him to take them wherever he
would, and the moment that he appeared in the garden two or three of
them would instantly settle on his arms or his head. The bees, too,
gradually came to put the same trust in him, and his whole life was
surrounded with gentle companionship. He always began the day with the
sun, walking on the high ridge above the slope on which the house lay,
and going through his form of worship. "It did not consist in a vain
moving of the lips, but in a sincere elevation of heart to the author of
the tender nature whose beauties lay spread out before my eyes. This act
passed rather in wonder and contemplation than in requests; and I always
knew that with the dispenser of true blessings, the best means of
obtaining those which are needful for us, is less to ask than to deserve
them."[80] These effusions may be taken for the beginning of the
deistical reaction in the eighteenth century. While the truly scientific
and progressive spirits were occupied in laborious preparation for
adding to human knowledge and systematising it, Rousseau walked with his
head in the clouds among gods, beneficent authors of nature, wise
dispensers of blessings, and the like. "Ah, madam," he once said,
"sometimes in the privacy of my study, with my hands pressed tight over
my eyes or in the darkness of the night, I am of his opinion that there
is no God. But look yonder (pointing with his hand to the sky, with head
erect, and an inspired glance): the rising of the sun, as it scatters
the mists that cover the earth and lays bare the wondrous glittering
scene of nature, disperses at the same moment all cloud from my soul. I
find my faith again, and my God, and my belief in him. I admire and
adore him, and I prostrate myself in his presence."[81] As if that
settled the question affirmatively, any more than the absence of such
theistic emotion in many noble spirits settles it negatively. God became
the highest known formula for sensuous expansion, the synthesis of all
complacent emotions, and Rousseau filled up the measure of his delight
by creating and invoking a Supreme Being to match with fine scenery and
sunny gardens. We shall have a better occasion to mark the attributes of
this important conception when we come to _Emilius_, where it was
launched in a panoply of resounding phrases upon a Europe which was
grown too strong for Christian dogma, and was not yet grown strong
enough to rest in a provisional ordering of the results of its own
positive knowledge. Walking on the terrace at Les Charmettes, you are at
the very birth-place of that particular Être Suprême to whom Robespierre
offered the incense of an official festival.
Sometimes the reading of a Jansenist book would make him unhappy by the
prominence into which it brought the displeasing idea of hell, and he
used now and then to pass a miserable day in wondering whether this
cruel destiny should be his. Madame de Warens, whose softness of heart
inspired her with a theology that ought to have satisfied a seraphic
doctor, had abolished hell, but she could not dispense with purgatory
because she did not know what to do with the souls of the wicked, being
unable either to damn them, or to instal them among the good until they
had been purified into goodness. In truth it must be confessed, says
Rousseau, that alike in this world and the other the wicked are
extremely embarrassing.[82] His own search after knowledge of his fate
is well known. One day, amusing himself in a characteristic manner by
throwing stones at trees, he began to be tormented by fear of the
eternal pit. He resolved to test his doom by throwing a stone at a
particular tree; if he hit, then salvation; if he missed, then
perdition. With a trembling hand and beating heart he threw; as he had
chosen a large tree and was careful not to place himself too far away,
all was well.[83] As a rule, however, in spite of the ugly phantoms of
theology, he passed his days in a state of calm. Even when illness
brought it into his head that he should soon know the future lot by more
assured experiment, he still preserved a tranquillity which he justly
qualifies as sensual.
In thinking of Rousseau's peculiar feeling for nature, which acquired
such a decisive place in his character during his life at Les
Charmettes, it is to be remembered that it was entirely devoid of that
stormy and boisterous quality which has grown up in more modern
literature, out of the violent attempt to press nature in her most awful
moods into the service of the great revolt against a social and
religious tradition that can no longer be endured. Of this revolt
Rousseau was a chief, and his passion for natural aspects was connected
with this attitude, but he did not seize those of them which the poet of
_Manfred_, for example, forced into an imputed sympathy with his own
rebellion. Rousseau always loved nature best in her moods of quiescence
and serenity, and in proportion as she lent herself to such moods in
men. He liked rivulets better than rivers. He could not bear the sight
of the sea; its infertile bosom and blind restless tumblings filled him
with melancholy. The ruins of a park affected him more than the ruins of
castles.[84] It is true that no plain, however beautiful, ever seemed so
in his eyes; he required torrents, rocks, dark forests, mountains, and
precipices.[85] This does not affect the fact that he never moralised
appalling landscape, as post-revolutionary writers have done, and that
the Alpine wastes which throw your puniest modern into a rapture, had no
attraction for him. He could steep himself in nature without climbing
fifteen thousand feet to find her. In landscape, as has been said by one
with a right to speak, Rousseau was truly a great artist, and you can,
if you are artistic too, follow him with confidence in his wanderings;
he understood that beauty does not require a great stage, and that the
effect of things lies in harmony.[86] The humble heights of the Jura,
and the lovely points of the valley of Chambéri, sufficed to give him
all the pleasure of which he was capable. In truth a man cannot escape
from his time, and Rousseau at least belonged to the eighteenth century
in being devoid of the capacity for feeling awe, and the taste for
objects inspiring it. Nature was a tender friend with softest bosom, and
no sphinx with cruel enigma. He felt neither terror, nor any sense of
the littleness of man, nor of the mysteriousness of life, nor of the
unseen forces which make us their sport, as he peered over the precipice
and heard the water roaring at the bottom of it; he only remained for
hours enjoying the physical sensation of dizziness with which it turned
his brain, with a break now and again for hurling large stones, and
watching them roll and leap down into the torrent, with as little
reflection and as little articulate emotion as if he had been a
child.[87]
Just as it is convenient for purposes of classification to divide a man
into body and soul, even when we believe the soul to be only a function
of the body, so people talk of his intellectual side and his emotional
side, his thinking quality and his feeling quality, though in fact and
at the roots these qualities are not two but one, with temperament for
the common substratum. During this period of his life the whole of
Rousseau's true force went into his feelings, and at all times feeling
predominated over reflection, with many drawbacks and some advantages of
a very critical kind for subsequent generations of men. Nearly every one
who came into contact with him in the way of testing his capacity for
being instructed pronounced him hopeless. He had several excellent
opportunities of learning Latin, especially at Turin in the house of
Count Gouvon, and in the seminary at Annecy, and at Les Charmettes he
did his best to teach himself, but without any better result than a very
limited power of reading. In learning one rule he forgot the last; he
could never master the most elementary laws of versification; he learnt
and re-learnt twenty times the Eclogues of Virgil, but not a single word
remained with him.[88] He was absolutely without verbal memory, and he
pronounces himself wholly incapable of learning anything from masters.
Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; he
could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction he
was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the first
day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself
up in his room, and worked night and day over the books with
indescribable efforts which covered many weeks. On proceeding to the
café to manifest his powers, he found that all the moves and
combinations had got mixed up in his head, he saw nothing but clouds on
the board, and as often as he repeated the experiment he only found
himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a genuine
passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any facility
at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying the
score of others.[89]
Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are
very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise
until after the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligence
do not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I
am carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united
with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation,
but when I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head
with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and
ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me
palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could
not write a single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the
chaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly
and after long and confused agitation."[90]
So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two
persons, we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that his
intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.
The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was
most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and
deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the same
receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under
sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual
faculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of
knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a
distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament
which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle
his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the
indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. His
rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut
off the direct and true impress of those objects and their relations,
which are the material of clear ideas. He was no doubt right in his
avowal that objects generally made less impression on him than the
recollection of them; that he could see nothing of what was before his
eyes, and had only his intelligence in cases where memories were
concerned; and that of what was said or done in his presence, he felt
and penetrated nothing.[91] In other words, this is to say that his
material of thought was not fact but image. When he plunged into
reflection, he did not deal with the objects of reflection at first hand
and in themselves, but only with the reminiscences of objects, which he
had never approached in a spirit of deliberate and systematic
observation, and with those reminiscences, moreover, suffused and
saturated by the impalpable but most potent essences of a fermenting
imagination. Instead of urgently seeking truth with the patient energy,
the wariness, and the conscience, with the sharpened instruments, the
systematic apparatus, and the minute feelers and tentacles of the
genuine thinker and solid reasoner, he only floated languidly on a
summer tide of sensation, and captured premiss and conclusion in a
succession of swoons. It would be a mistake to contend that no work can
be done for the world by this method, or that truth only comes to those
who chase her with logical forceps. But one should always try to
discover how a teacher of men came by his ideas, whether by careful
toil, or by the easy bequest of generous phantasy.
To give a zest to rural delight, and partly perhaps to satisfy the
intellectual interest which must have been an instinct in one who became
so consummate a master in the great and noble art of composition,
Rousseau, during the time when he lived with Madame de Warens, tried as
well as he knew how to acquire a little knowledge of what fruit the
cultivation of the mind of man had hitherto brought forth. According to
his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first
drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man
wrote at this time escaped him. His taste for Voltaire inspired him with
the desire of writing with elegance, and of imitating "the fine and
enchanting colour of Voltaire's style"[92]--an object in which he cannot
be held to have in the least succeeded, though he achieved a superb
style of his own. On his return from Turin Madame de Warens had begun in
some small way to cultivate a taste for letters in him, though he had
lost the enthusiasm of his childhood for reading. Saint Evremond,
Puffendorff, the Henriade, and the Spectator happened to be in his room,
and he turned over their pages. The Spectator, he says, pleased him
greatly and did him much good.[93] Madame de Warens was what he calls
protestant in literary taste, and would talk for ever of the great
Bayle, while she thought more of Saint Evremond than she could ever
persuade Rousseau to think. Two or three years later than this he began
to use his own mind more freely, and opened his eyes for the first time
to the greatest question that ever dawns upon any human intelligence
that has the privilege of discerning it, the problem of a philosophy and
a body of doctrine.
His way of answering it did not promise the best results. He read an
introduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclopædia and tried to
learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to study
subjects apart. This he found a better plan for one to whom long
application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy
himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the
ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning's work, after an hour
or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on
the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found
these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among
themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them
with one another. This was tedious, so he took up another method, on
which he congratulated himself to the end of his life. It consisted in
simply adopting and following the ideas of each author, without
comparing them either with one another or with those of other writers,
and above all without any criticism of his own. Let me begin, he said,
by collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear,
until my head is well enough stocked to enable me to compare and choose.
At the end of some years passed "in never thinking exactly, except after
other people, without reflecting so to speak, and almost without
reasoning," he found himself in a state to think for himself. "In spite
of beginning late to exercise my judicial faculty, I never found that it
had lost its vigour, and when I came to publish my own ideas, I was
hardly accused of being a servile disciple."[96]
To that fairly credible account of the matter, one can only say that
this mutually exclusive way of learning the thoughts of others, and
developing thoughts of your own, is for an adult probably the most
mischievous, where it is not the most impotent, fashion in which
intellectual exercise can well be taken. It is exactly the use of the
judicial faculty, criticising, comparing, and defining, which is
indispensable in order that a student should not only effectually
assimilate the ideas of a writer, but even know what those ideas come to
and how much they are worth. And so when he works at ideas of his own, a
judicial faculty which has been kept studiously slumbering for some
years, is not likely to revive in full strength without any preliminary
training. Rousseau was a man of singular genius, and he set an
extraordinary mark on Europe, but this mark would have been very
different if he had ever mastered any one system of thought, or if he
had ever fully grasped what systematic thinking means. Instead of this,
his debt to the men whom he read was a debt of piecemeal, and his
obligation an obligation for fragments; and this is perhaps the worst
way of acquiring an intellectual lineage, for it leaves out the vital
continuity of temper and method. It is a small thing to accept this or
that of Locke's notions upon education or the origin of ideas, if you do
not see the merit of his way of coming by his notions. In short,
Rousseau has distinctions in abundance, but the distinction of knowing
how to think, in the exact sense of that term, was hardly among them,
and neither now nor at any other time did he go through any of that
toilsome and vigorous intellectual preparation to which the ablest of
his contemporaries, Diderot, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet,
Hume, all submitted themselves. His comfortable view was that "the
sensible and interesting conversations of a woman of merit are more
proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of
books."[97]
Style, however, in which he ultimately became such a proficient, and
which wrought such marvels as only style backed by passion can work,
already engaged his serious attention. We have already seen how Voltaire
implanted in him the first root idea, which so many of us never perceive
at all, that there is such a quality of writing as style. He evidently
took pains with the form of expression and thought about it, in
obedience to some inborn harmonious predisposition which is the source
of all veritable eloquence, though there is no strong trace now nor for
many years to come of any irresistible inclination for literary
composition. We find him, indeed, in 1736 showing consciousness of a
slight skill in writing,[98] but he only thought of it as a possible
recommendation for a secretaryship to some great person. He also appears
to have practised verses, not for their own sake, for he always most
justly thought his own verses mediocre, and they are even worse; but on
the ground that verse-making is a rather good exercise for breaking
one's self to elegant inversions, and learning a greater ease in
prose.[99] At the age of one and twenty he composed a comedy, long
afterwards damned as _Narcisse_. Such prelusions, however, were of small
importance compared with the fact of his being surrounded by a moral
atmosphere in which his whole mind was steeped. It is not in the study
of Voltaire or another, but in the deep soft soil of constant mood and
old habit that such a style as Rousseau's has its growth.
It was the custom to return to Chambéri for the winter, and the day of
their departure from Les Charmettes was always a day blurred and tearful
for Rousseau; he never left it without kissing the ground, the trees,
the flowers; he had to be torn away from it as from a loved companion.
At the first melting of the winter snows they left their dungeon in
Chambéri, and they never missed the earliest song of the nightingale.
Many a joyful day of summer peace remained vivid in Rousseau's memory,
and made a mixed heaven and hell for him long years after in the
stifling dingy Paris street, and the raw and cheerless air of a
Derbyshire winter.[100] "We started early in the morning," he says,
describing one of these simple excursions on the day of St. Lewis, who
was the very unconscious patron saint of Madame de Warens, "together and
alone; I proposed that we should go and ramble about the side of the
valley opposite to our own, which we had not yet visited. We sent our
provisions on before us, for we were to be out all day. We went from
hill to hill and wood to wood, sometimes in the sun and often in the
shade, resting from time to time and forgetting ourselves for whole
hours; chatting about ourselves, our union, our dear lot, and offering
unheard prayers that it might last. All seemed to conspire for the bliss
of this day. Rain had fallen a short time before; there was no dust, and
the little streams were full; a light fresh breeze stirred the leaves,
the air was pure, the horizon without a cloud, and the same serenity
reigned in our own hearts. Our dinner was cooked in a peasant's cottage,
and we shared it with his family. These Savoyards are such good souls!
After dinner we sought shade under some tall trees, where, while I
collected dry sticks for making our coffee, Maman amused herself by
botanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of
tenderness and effusion."[101] This is one of such days as the soul
turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized it,
and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of
irrecoverable things.
He was resolved to bind himself to Madame de Warens with an inalterable
fidelity for all the rest of his days; he would watch over her with all
the dutiful and tender vigilance of a son, and she should be to him
something dearer than mother or wife or sister. What actually befell was
this. He was attacked by vapours, which he characterises as the disorder
of the happy. One symptom of his disease was the conviction derived from
the rash perusal of surgeon's treatises, that he was suffering from a
polypus in the heart. On the not very chivalrous principle that if he
did not spend Madame de Warens' money, he was only leaving it for
adventurers and knaves, he proceeded to Montpellier to consult the
physicians, and took the money for his expenses out of his
benefactress's store, which was always slender because it was always
open to any hand. While on the road, he fell into an intrigue with a
travelling companion, whom critics have compared to the fair Philina of
Wilhelm Meister. In due time, the Montpellier doctor being unable to
discover a disease, declared that the patient had none. The scenery was
dull and unattractive, and this would have counterbalanced the
weightiest prudential reasons with him at any time. Rousseau debated
whether he should keep tryst with his gay fellow-traveller, or return to
Chambéri. Remorse and that intractable emptiness of pocket which is the
iron key to many a deed of ingenuous-looking self-denial and Spartan
virtue, directed him homewards. Here he had a surprise, and perhaps
learnt a lesson. He found installed in the house a personage whom he
describes as tall, fair, noisy, coxcombical, flat-faced, flat-souled.
Another triple alliance seemed a thing odious in the eyes of a man whom
his travelling diversions had made a Pharisee for the hour. He
protested, but Madame de Warens was a woman of principle, and declined
to let Rousseau, who had profited by the doctrine of indifference, now
set up in his own favour the contrary doctrine of a narrow and churlish
partiality. So a short, delicious, and never-forgotten episode came to
an end: this pair who had known so much happiness together were happy
together no more, and the air became peopled for Rousseau with wan
spectres of dead joys and fast gathering cares.
The dates of the various events described in the fifth and sixth books
of the Confessions are inextricable, and the order is evidently inverted
more than once. The inversion of order is less serious than the
contradictions between the dates of the Confessions and the more
authentic and unmistakable dates of his letters. For instance, he
describes a visit to Geneva as having been made shortly before Lautrec's
temporary pacification of the civic troubles of that town; and that
event took place in the spring of 1738. This would throw the Montpellier
journey, which he says came after the visit to Geneva, into 1738, but
the letters to Madame de Warens from Grenoble and Montpellier are dated
in the autumn and winter of 1737.[102] Minor verifications attest the
exactitude of the dates of the letters,[103] and we may therefore
conclude that he returned from Montpellier, found his place taken and
lost his old delight in Les Charmettes, in the early part of 1738. In
the tenth of the Rêveries he speaks of having passed "a space of four or
five years" in the bliss of Les Charmettes, and it is true that his
connection with it in one way and another lasted from the middle of 1736
until about the middle of 1741. But as he left for Montpellier in the
autumn of 1737, and found the obnoxious Vinzenried installed in 1738,
the pure and characteristic felicity of Les Charmettes perhaps only
lasted about a year or a year and a half. But a year may set a deep mark
on a man, and give him imperishable taste of many things bitter
and sweet.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] _Conf._, iii. 177.
[39] Lamartine in _Raphael_ defies "a reasonable man to recompose with
any reality the character that Rousseau gives to his mistress, out of
the contradictory elements which he associates in her nature. One of
these elements excludes the other." It is worth while for any who care
for this kind of study to compare Madame de Warens with the Marquise
de Courcelles, whom Sainte-Beuve has well called the Manon Lescaut of
the seventeenth century.
[40] Described by Rousseau in a memorandum for the biographer of M. de
Bernex, printed in _Mélanges_, pp. 139-144.
[41] De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the
sexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of
religion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the
doctrine that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the
gratification of this appetite in a man as to decline to give food and
drink to the starving. Picot's _Hist. de Genève_, vol. ii.
[42] _Conf._, v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401.
[43] _Conf._, v. 345.
[44] _Conf._, ii. 83.
[45] _Ib._ ii. 82.
[46] _Ib._ iii. 179. See also 200.
[47] _Conf._, iii. 177, 178.
[48] _Conf._, iii. 183.
[49] M. d'Aubonne.
[50] _Conf._, iii 192.
[51] M. Gatier.
[52] M. Gaime.
[53] _Conf._, iii. 204.
[54] _Ib._ iii. 209, 210.
[55] _Conf._, iii. 217-222.
[56] _Conf._, iv. 227.
[57] _Ib._ iii. 224.
[58] One Venture de Villeneuve, who visited him years afterwards
(1755) in Paris, when Rousseau found that the idol of old days was a
crapulent debauchee. _Ib._ viii. 221.
[59] Mdlles. de Graffenried and Galley. _Conf._, iv. 231.
[60] _Ib._ iv. 254-256.
[61] _Conf._, iv. 253.
[62] While in the ambassador's house at Soleure, he was lodged in a
room which had once belonged to his namesake, Jean Baptiste Rousseau
(_b. 1670--d. 1741_), whom the older critics astonishingly insist on
counting the first of French lyric poets. There was a third Rousseau,
Pierre [_b. 1725--d. 1785_], who wrote plays and did other work now
well forgotten. There are some lines imperfectly commemorative of the
trio--
Trois auteurs que Rousseau l'on nomme, Connus de Paris jusqu'à Rome,
Sont différens; voici par où; Rousseau de Paris fut grand homme;
Rousseau de Genève est un fou; Rousseau de Toulouse un atome.
Jean Jacques refers to both his namesakes in his letter to Voltaire,
Jan. 30, 1750. _Corr._, i. 145.
[63] The only object which ever surpassed his expectation was the
great Roman structure near Nismes, the Pont du Gard. _Conf._, vi. 446.
[64] Rousseau gives 1732 as the probable date of his return to
Chambéri, after his first visit to Paris [_Conf._, v. 305], and the
only objection to this is his mention of the incident of the march of
the French troops, which could not have happened until the winter of
1733, as having taken place "some months" after his arrival.
Musset-Pathay accepts this as decisive, and fixes the return in the
spring of 1733 [i. 12]. My own conjectural chronology is this: Returns
from Turin towards the autumn of 1729; stays at Annecy until the
spring of 1731; passes the winter of 1731-2 at Neuchâtel; first visits
Paris in spring of 1732; returns to Savoy in the early summer of 1732.
But a precise harmonising of the dates in the Confessions is
impossible; Rousseau wrote them three and thirty years after our
present point [in 1766 at Wootton], and never claimed to be exact in
minuteness of date. Fortunately such matters in the present case are
absolutely devoid of importance.
[65] _Conf._, iv. 279, 280.
[66] _Conf._, iv. 290, 291,
[67] _Conf._, iv. 281-283.
[68] _Conf._, v. 325.
[69] _Conf._, v. 360-364. _Corr._, i. 21-24.
[70] _Conf._, v. 349, 350.
[71] Apparently in the summer of 1736, though, the reference to the
return of the French troops at the peace [_Ib._ v. 365] would place it
in 1735.
[72] _Ib._ v. 356
[73] _Ib._
[74] _Conf._, v. 315, 316.
[75] _Ib._ iv. 276. _Nouv. Hél._, II. xiv. 381, etc.
[76] He refers to the ill-health of his youth, _Conf._, vii. 32, and
describes an ominous head seizure while at Chambéri, _Ib._ vi. 396.
[77] Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the
fifth book. The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used
to be, and has gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant,
including his poor _clavecin_ and his watch. In an outside wall,
Hérault de Sechelles, when Commissioner from the Convention in the
department of Mont Blanc, inserted a little white stone with two most
lapidary stanzas inscribed upon it, about _génie, solitude, fierté,
gloire, vérité, envie_, and the like.
[78] _Rêveries_, x. 336 (1778).
[79] _Conf._, vi. 393.
[80] _Conf._, vi. 412.
[81] _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition:
Charpentier. 1865.)
[82] _Conf._, vi. 399.
[83] _Ib._ vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's
_Life_, p. 126.
[84] Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. _Oeuvres_ (Ed. 1818),
xii. 70, etc.
[85] _Conf._, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of the
Valais, in the _Nouv. Hél._, Pt. I. Let. xxiii.
[86] George Sand in _Mademoiselle la Quintinie_ (p. 27), a book
containing some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy
landscape.
[87] _Conf._, iv. 298.
[88] _Conf._, vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383,
384. Also vii. 53.
[89] _Conf._, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also _Mém. de Mdme.
d'Epinay_, ii. 151.
[90] _Ib._ iii. 192, 193.
[91] _Conf._, iv. 301; iii. 195.
[92] _Conf._, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date assigned to the
correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instances
how little we can trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, though
their substantial veracity is confirmed by all the collateral evidence
that we have.
[93] _Ib._ iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de
Warens, see also _Ib._ vii. 46.
[94] _Conf._, vi. 409.
[95] _Ib._ vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking "_et cetera_."
[96] _Conf._, vi. 414
[97] _Conf._, iv. 295. See also v. 346.
[98] _Corr._, 1736, pp. 26, 27.
[99] _Conf._, iv. 271, where he says further that he never found
enough attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it.
[100] The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in
Derbyshire, in the winter of 1766-1767.
[101] _Conf._, vi. 422.
[102] _Corr._, i. 43, 46, 62, etc.
[103] Musset-Pathay, i. 23, _n._