THERESA LE VASSEUR.
Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delight
perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, or
even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The sight of simple
hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former days into a
present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching enough.
But there is a certain grossness around the circumstances in which
Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his
embarrassment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as a
simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves
after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame
de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be
interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons.
His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abbé of
the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac
(1714-80).
The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has
ever been written, was not successful in the practical and far more
arduous side of that master art.[104] We have seen how little training
he had ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and
self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all
who have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went
well, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to
confess that he was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand
him, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of
the disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, human
excellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was
ready to kill them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to render
them either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacher
himself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal his
employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in the
secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and some dear
romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of this kind
more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These are
surely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng of
worthier memories.
It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the
deadly drudgery of his present employment to the beatitude of former
days. "What rendered my present condition insupportable was the
recollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my
fountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt myself born
and who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our
guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping of
my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this
was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears
under all the discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to
quicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his usual promptitude in
escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at
Lyons (April, 1740--spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old
haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that
happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his
desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris
to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had
invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the
second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had
become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]
It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him. His plan of
musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no
member of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb,
inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which
his critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and
objections which he perceived that they did not at all understand. His
experience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection,
how even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any
one thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible
enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without
study of the special matter in question. It astonished him that all
these learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorant
that a man should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft.[107]
His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered
himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. He
had a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future.
He was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering
gallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of
them, declaring his passion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of
one, and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and the
attentions of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by
inviting him to dine in the servants' hall, were not pleasing to
her.[108] She forgave the impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M.
Francueil, was Rousseau's patron for some years.[109] On the whole,
however, in spite of his own account of his social ineptitude, there
cannot have been anything so repulsive in his manners as this account
would lead us to think. There is no grave anachronism in introducing
here the impression which he made on two fine ladies not many years
after this. "He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he
is without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usages
of society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely intelligent. He
has a brown complexion, while eyes that overflow with fire give
animation to his expression. When he has spoken and you look at him, he
appears comely; but when you try to recall him, his image is always
extremely plain. They say that he has bad health, and endures agony
which from some motive of vanity he most carefully conceals. It is
this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of
sullenness."[110] The other lady, who saw him at the same time, speaks
of "the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job for you, but with
wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his history is as queer as
his person, and that is saying a good deal.... Madame Maupeou and I
tried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face,' said she (for it is
certain he is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays a great
part in his romance.' 'No,' said I, 'his nose tells me that it is
vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis both one and the other.'"[111]
One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post of
secretary to the French ambassador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743
our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment in
the famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of which
there are not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rank
foremost in the short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seen
not to have been decisive at all, but mere interruptions conducting
nowhither. In truth the critical moments with us are mostly as points in
slumber. Even if the ancient oracles of the gods were to regain their
speech once more on the earth, men would usually go to consult them on
days when the answer would have least significance, and could guide
them least far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as
it happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, should
have got a footing in the train of the ambassador of a great government,
would naturally seem to him and others as chance's one critical stroke
in his life. In reality it was nothing. The Count of Montaigu, his
master, was one of the worst characters with whom Rousseau could for his
own profit have been brought into contact. In his professional quality
he was not far from imbecile. The folly and weakness of the government
at Versailles during the reign of Lewis XV., and its indifference to
competence in every department except perhaps partially in the fisc, was
fairly illustrated in its absurd representative at Venice. The
secretary, whose renown has preserved his master's name, has recorded
more amply than enough the grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is
for once eager to assert his own efficiency, and declares that he
rendered many important services for which he was repaid with
ingratitude and persecution.[112] One would be glad to know what the
Count of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth Rousseau's
conduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he who had
hitherto always been unfaithful over few things, suddenly touched
perfection when he became lord over many.
There is other testimony, however, to the ambassador's morbid quality,
of which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing
among men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking
trait. For instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three
shoes are equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair
which is more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his
shoes in threes.[113] It was natural enough that such a master and such
a secretary should quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringing
quality which we have noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau's
hungry youthful time, had been hardened out of him by circumstance or
the strengthening of inborn fibre. He would now neither dine in a
servants' hall because a fine lady forgot what was due to a musician,
nor share his fees with a great ambassador who forgot what was due to
himself. These sordid disputes are of no interest now to anybody, and we
need only say that after a period of eighteen months passed in
uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his count in extreme dudgeon,
and the diplomatic career which he had promised to himself came to the
same close as various other careers had already done.
He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation
at the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and
laying memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He assures
us that it was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left
in his soul the germ of exasperation against preposterous civil
institutions, "in which the true common weal and real justice are always
sacrificed to some seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive
of all order, and only adds the sanction of public authority to the
oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong."[114]
One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the
memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with
most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to
his new post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the
felucca, or passing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may
notice in passing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of
the fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left
the least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and
thought of it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the
want of space and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and
preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither
window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw
to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself.
"I manufactured," he says, "a good bed out of my coats and shirts,
sheets out of towels which I stitched together, a pillow out of my old
cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a
table of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, and
arranged some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I made
myself so comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows,
I was nearly as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my
lodgings in Paris. My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers,
with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my
dining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat,
and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew,
to warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was neither
writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk in
the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out on
to the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out. I
passed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole three
weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness."[115]
These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but
his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable
periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain
gaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that
an earlier century would have counted unholy.[116] He rarely sought
pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had
a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the
degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's
work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one
from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.[117] It is pleasanter
to think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which
ten years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that
French melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A
Venetian experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less
weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which
persuaded him that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who had
never heard any music was invited to listen first of all to a French
monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in the
Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the performance of the
French piece. The first notes of the Italian were no sooner struck, than
his eyes and whole expression softened; he was enchanted, surrendered
his whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the music, and could
never again be induced to listen to the performance of any
French air.[118]
More important than this was the circumstance that the sight of the
defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind
to political speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a
book that was to be called Institutions Politiques.[119] The work, as
thus designed and named, was never written, but the idea of it, after
many years of meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality,
and then in the Social Contract.
If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in
his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event
which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by
came to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but
which he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven
permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him
to bear his many sore burdens.[120]
He took up his quarters at a small and dirty hotel not far from the
Sorbonne, where he had alighted on the occasion of his second arrival in
Paris.[121] Here was a kitchen-maid, some two-and-twenty years old, who
used to sit at table with her mistress and the guests of the house. The
company was rough, being mainly composed of Irish and Gascon abbés, and
other people to whom graces of mien and refinement of speech had come
neither by nature nor cultivation. The hostess herself pitched the
conversation in merry Rabelaisian key, and the apparent modesty of her
serving-woman gave a zest to her own licence. Rousseau was moved with
pity for a maid defenceless against a ribald storm, and from pity he
advanced to some warmer sentiment, and he and Theresa Le Vasseur took
each other for better for worse, in a way informal but sufficiently
effective. This was the beginning of a union which lasted for the length
of a generation and more, down to the day of Rousseau's most tragical
ending.[122] She thought she saw in him a worthy soul; and he was
convinced that he saw in her a woman of sensibility, simple and free
from trick, and neither of the two, he says, was deceived in respect of
the other. Her intellectual quality was unique. She could never be
taught to read with any approach to success. She could never follow the
order of the twelve months of the year, nor master a single arithmetical
figure, nor count a sum of money, nor reckon the price of a thing. A
month's instruction was not enough to give knowledge of the hours of the
day on the dial-plate. The words she used were often the direct
opposites of the words that she meant to use.[123]
The marriage choice of others is the inscrutable puzzle of those who
have no eye for the fact that such choice is the great match of cajolery
between purpose and invisible hazard; the blessedness of many lives is
the stake, as intention happens to cheat accident or to be cheated by
it. When the match is once over, deep criticism of a game of pure chance
is time wasted. The crude talk in which the unwise deliver their
judgments upon the conditions of success in the relations between men
and women, has flowed with unprofitable copiousness as to this not very
inviting case. People construct an imaginary Rousseau out of his
writings, and then fetter their elevated, susceptible, sensitive, and
humane creation, to the unfortunate woman who could never be taught that
April is the month after March, or that twice four and a half are nine.
Now we have already seen enough of Rousseau to know for how infinitely
little he counted the gift of a quick wit, and what small store he set
either on literary varnish or on capacity for receiving it. He was
touched in people with whom he had to do, not by attainment, but by
moral fibre or his imaginary impression of their moral fibre. Instead of
analysing a character, bringing its several elements into the balance,
computing the more or less of this faculty or that, he loved to feel its
influence as a whole, indivisible, impalpable, playing without sound or
agitation around him like soft light and warmth and the fostering air.
The deepest ignorance, the dullest incapacity, the cloudiest faculties
of apprehension, were nothing to him in man or woman, provided he could
only be sensible of that indescribable emanation from voice and eye and
movement, that silent effusion of serenity around spoken words, which
nature has given to some tranquillising spirits, and which would have
left him free in an even life of indolent meditation and unfretted
sense. A woman of high, eager, stimulating kind would have been a more
fatal mate for him than the most stupid woman that ever rivalled the
stupidity of man. Stimulation in any form always meant distress to
Rousseau. The moist warmth of the Savoy valleys was not dearer to him
than the subtle inhalations of softened and close enveloping
companionship, in which the one needful thing is not intellectual
equality, but easy, smooth, constant contact of feeling about the
thousand small matters that make up the existence of a day. This is not
the highest ideal of union that one's mind can conceive from the point
of view of intense productive energy, but Rousseau was not concerned
with the conditions of productive energy. He only sought to live, to be
himself, and he knew better than any critics can know for him, what kind
of nature was the best supplement for his own. As he said in an
apophthegm with a deep melancholy lying at the bottom of it,--you never
can cite the example of a thoroughly happy man, for no one but the man
himself knows anything about it.[124] "By the side of people we love,"
he says very truly, "sentiment nourishes the intelligence as well as the
heart, and we have little occasion to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with
my Theresa as pleasantly as with the finest genius in the
universe."[125]
Theresa Le Vasseur would probably have been happier if she had married a
stout stable-boy, as indeed she did some thirty years hence by way of
gathering up the fragments that were left; but there is little reason to
think that Rousseau would have been much happier with any other mate
than he was with Theresa. There was no social disparity between the two.
She was a person accustomed to hardship and coarseness, and so was he.
And he always systematically preferred the honest coarseness of the
plain people from whom he was sprung and among whom he had lived, to the
more hateful coarseness of heart which so often lurks under fine manners
and a complete knowledge of the order of the months in the year and the
arithmetical table. Rousseau had been a serving-man, and there was no
deterioration in going with a serving-woman.[126] However this may be,
it is certain that for the first dozen years or so of his
partnership--and many others as well as he are said to have found in
this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,--Rousseau
had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends
pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly
brutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, how
much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the
shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from
beginning to end entirely voluntary? If he attached himself deliberately
to an unworthy object by a bond which he was indisputably free to break
on any day that he chose, were not the effects of such a union as much
due to his own character which sought, formed, and perpetuated it, as to
the character of Theresa Le Vasseur? Nothing, as he himself said in a
passage to which he appends a vindication of Theresa, shows the true
leanings and inclinations of a man better than the sort of attachments
which he forms.[127]
It is a natural blunder in a literate and well-mannered society to
charge a mistake against a man who infringes its conventions in this
particular way. Rousseau knew what he was about, as well as politer
persons. He was at least as happy with his kitchen wench as Addison was
with his countess, or Voltaire with his marchioness, and he would not
have been what he was, nor have played the part that he did play in the
eighteenth century, if he had felt anything derogatory or unseemly in a
kitchen wench. The selection was probably not very deliberate; as it
happened, Theresa served as a standing illustration of two of his most
marked traits, a contempt for mere literary culture, and a yet deeper
contempt for social accomplishments and social position. In time he
found out the grievous disadvantages of living in solitude with a
companion who did not know how to think, and whose stock of ideas was so
slight that the only common ground of talk between them was gossip and
quodlibets. But her lack of sprightliness, beauty, grace, refinement,
and that gentle initiative by which women may make even a sombre life so
various, went for nothing with him. What his friends missed in her, he
did not seek and would not have valued; and what he found in her, they
were naturally unable to appreciate, for they never were in the mood for
detecting it. "I have not seen much of happy men," he wrote when near
his end, "perhaps nothing; but I have many a time seen contented hearts,
and of all the objects that have struck me, I believe it is this which
has always given most contentment to myself."[128] This moderate
conception of felicity, which was always so characteristic with him, as
an even, durable, and rather low-toned state of the feelings, accounts
for his prolonged acquiescence in a companion whom men with more elation
in their ideal would assuredly have found hostile even to the most
modest contentment.
"The heart of my Theresa," he wrote long after the first tenderness had
changed into riper emotion on his side, and, alas, into indifference on
hers, "was that of an angel; our attachment waxed stronger with our
intimacy, and we felt more and more each day that we were made for one
another. If our pleasures could be described, their simplicity would
make you laugh; our excursions together out of town, in which I would
munificently expend eight or ten halfpence in some rural tavern; our
modest suppers at my window, seated in front of one another on two small
chairs placed on a trunk that filled up the breadth of the embrasure.
Here the window did duty for a table, we breathed the fresh air, we
could see the neighbourhood and the people passing by, and though on the
fourth story, could look down into the street as we ate. Who shall
describe, who shall feel the charms of those meals, consisting of a
coarse quartern loaf, some cherries, a tiny morsel of cheese, and a pint
of wine which we drank between us? Ah, what delicious seasoning there is
in friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul! We used
sometimes to remain thus until midnight, without once thinking of the
time."[129]
Men and women are often more fairly judged by the way in which they bear
the burden of what they have done, than by the prime act which laid the
burden on their lives.[130] The deeper part of us shows in the manner of
accepting consequences. On the whole, Rousseau's relations with this
woman present him in a better light than those with any other person
whatever. If he became with all the rest of the world suspicious, angry,
jealous, profoundly diseased in a word, with her he was habitually
trustful, affectionate, careful, most long-suffering. It sometimes even
occurs to us that his constancy to Theresa was only another side of the
morbid perversity of his relations with the rest of the world. People of
a certain kind not seldom make the most serious and vital sacrifices for
bare love of singularity, and a man like Rousseau was not unlikely to
feel an eccentric pleasure in proving that he could find merit in a
woman who to everybody else was desperate. One who is on bad terms with
the bulk of his fellows may contrive to save his self-respect and
confirm his conviction that they are all in the wrong, by preserving
attachment to some one to whom general opinion is hostile; the private
argument being that if he is capable of this degree of virtue and
friendship in an unfavourable case, how much more could he have
practised it with others, if they would only have allowed him. Whether
this kind of apology was present to his mind or not, Rousseau could
always refer those who charged him with black caprice, to his steady
kindness towards Theresa Le Vasseur. Her family were among the most
odious of human beings, greedy, idle, and ill-humoured, while her mother
had every fault that a woman could have in Rousseau's eyes, including
that worst fault of setting herself up for a fine wit. Yet he bore with
them all for years, and did not break with Madame Le Vasseur until she
had poisoned the mind of her daughter, and done her best by rapacity and
lying to render him contemptible to all his friends.
In the course of years Theresa herself gave him unmistakable signs of a
change in her affections. "I began to feel," he says, at a date of
sixteen or seventeen years from our present point, "that she was no
longer for me what she had been in our happy years, and I felt it all
the more clearly as I was still the same towards her."[131] This was in
1762, and her estrangement grew deeper and her indifference more open,
until at length, seven years afterwards, we find that she had proposed a
separation from him. What the exact reasons for this gradual change may
have been we do not know, nor have we any right in ignorance of the
whole facts to say that they were not adequate and just. There are two
good traits recorded of the woman's character. She could never console
herself for having let her father be taken away to end his days
miserably in a house of charity.[132] And the repudiation of her
children, against which the glowing egoism of maternity always rebelled,
remained a cruel dart in her bosom as long as she lived. We may suppose
that there was that about household life with Rousseau which might have
bred disgusts even in one as little fastidious as Theresa was. Among
other things which must have been hard to endure, we know that in
composing his works he was often weeks together without speaking a word
to her.[133] Perhaps again it would not be difficult to produce some
passages in Rousseau's letters and in the Confessions, which show traces
of that subtle contempt for women that lurks undetected in many who
would blush to avow it. Whatever the causes may have been, from
indifference she passed to something like aversion, and in the one
place where a word of complaint is wrung from him, he describes her as
rending and piercing his heart at a moment when his other miseries were
at their height. His patience at any rate was inexhaustible; now old,
worn by painful bodily infirmities, racked by diseased suspicion and the
most dreadful and tormenting of the minor forms of madness, nearly
friendless, and altogether hopeless, he yet kept unabated the old
tenderness of a quarter of a century before, and expressed it in words
of such gentleness, gravity, and self-respecting strength, as may touch
even those whom his books leave unmoved, and who view his character with
deepest distrust. "For the six-and-twenty years, dearest, that our union
has lasted, I have never sought my happiness except in yours, and have
never ceased to try to make you happy; and you saw by what I did
lately,[134] that your honour and happiness were one as dear to me as
the other. I see with pain that success does not answer my solicitude,
and that my kindness is not as sweet to you to receive, as it is sweet
to me to show. I know that the sentiments of honour and uprightness with
which you were born will never change in you; but as for those of
tenderness and attachment which were once reciprocal between us, I feel
that they now only exist on my side. Not only, dearest of all friends,
have you ceased to find pleasure in my company, but you have to tax
yourself severely even to remain a few minutes with me out of
complaisance. You are at your ease with all the world but me. I do not
speak to you of many other things. We must take our friends with their
faults, and I ought to pass over yours, as you pass over mine. If you
were happy with me I could be content, but I see clearly that you are
not, and this is what makes my heart sore. If I could do better for your
happiness, I would do it and hold my peace; but that is not possible. I
have left nothing undone that I thought would contribute to your
felicity. At this moment, while I am writing to you, overwhelmed with
distress and misery, I have no more true or lively desire than to finish
my days in closest union with you. You know my lot,--it is such as one
could not even dare to describe, for no one could believe it. I never
had, my dearest, other than one single solace, but that the sweetest; it
was to pour out all my heart in yours; when I talked of my miseries to
you, they were soothed; and when you had pitied me, I needed pity no
more. My every resource, my whole confidence, is in you and in you only;
my soul cannot exist without sympathy, and cannot find sympathy except
with you. It is certain that if you fail me and I am forced to live
alone, I am as a dead man. But I should die a thousand times more
cruelly still, if we continued to live together in misunderstanding, and
if confidence and friendship were to go out between us. It would be a
hundred times better to cease to see each other; still to live, and
sometimes to regret one another. Whatever sacrifice may be necessary on
my part to make you happy, be so at any cost, and I shall be content.
We have faults to weep over and to expiate, but no crimes; let us not
blot out by the imprudence of our closing days the sweetness and purity
of those we have passed together."[135] Think ill as we may of
Rousseau's theories, and meanly as we may of some parts of his conduct,
yet to those who can feel the pulsing of a human life apart from a man's
formulæ, and can be content to leave to sure circumstance the tragic
retaliation for evil behaviour, this letter is like one of the great
master's symphonies, whose theme falls in soft strokes of melting pity
on the heart. In truth, alas, the union of this now diverse pair had
been stained by crimes shortly after its beginning. In the estrangement
of father and mother in their late years we may perhaps hear the rustle
and spy the pale forms of the avenging spectres of their lost children.
At the time when the connection with Theresa Le Vasseur was formed,
Rousseau did not know how to gain bread. He composed the musical
diversion of the Muses Galantes, which Rameau rightly or wrongly
pronounced a plagiarism, and at the request of Richelieu he made some
minor re-adaptations in Voltaire's Princesse de Navarre, which Rameau
had set to music--that "farce of the fair" to which the author of Zaïre
owed his seat in the Academy.[136] But neither task brought him money,
and he fell back on a sort of secretaryship, with perhaps a little of
the valet in it, to Madame Dupin and her son-in-law, M. de Francueil,
for which he received the too moderate income of nine hundred francs. On
one occasion he returned to his room expecting with eager impatience the
arrival of a remittance, the proceeds of some small property which came
to him by the death of his father.[137] He found the letter, and was
opening it with trembling hands, when he was suddenly smitten with shame
at his want of self-control; he placed it unopened on the chimney-piece,
undressed, slept better than usual, and when he awoke the next morning,
he had forgotten all about the letter until it caught his eye. He was
delighted to find that it contained his money, but "I can swear," he
adds, "that my liveliest delight was in having conquered myself." An
occasion for self-conquest on a more considerable scale was at hand. In
these tight straits, he received grievous news from the unfortunate
Theresa. He made up his mind cheerfully what to do; the mother
acquiesced after sore persuasion and with bitter tears; and the new-born
child was dropped into oblivion in the box of the asylum for foundlings.
Next year the same easy expedient was again resorted to, with the same
heedlessness on the part of the father, the same pain and reluctance on
the part of the mother. Five children in all were thus put away, and
with such entire absence of any precaution with a view to their
identification in happier times, that not even a note was kept of the
day of their birth.[138]
People have made a great variety of remarks upon this transaction, from
the economist who turns it into an illustration of the evil results of
hospitals for foundlings in encouraging improvident unions, down to the
theologian who sees in it new proof of the inborn depravity of the human
heart and the fall of man. Others have vindicated it in various ways,
one of them courageously taking up the ground that Rousseau had good
reason to believe that the children were not his own, and therefore was
fully warranted in sending the poor creatures kinless into the
universe.[139] Perhaps it is not too transcendental a thing to hope that
civilisation may one day reach a point when a plea like this shall count
for an aggravation rather than a palliative; when a higher conception of
the duties of humanity, familiarised by the practice of adoption as well
as by the spread of both rational and compassionate considerations as to
the blameless little ones, shall have expelled what is surely as some
red and naked beast's emotion of fatherhood. What may be an excellent
reason for repudiating a woman, can never be a reason for abandoning a
child, except with those whom reckless egoism has made willing to think
it a light thing to fling away from us the moulding of new lives and the
ensuring of salutary nurture for growing souls.
We are, however, dispensed from entering into these questions of the
greater morals by the very plain account which the chief actor has given
us, almost in spite of himself. His crime like most others was the
result of heedlessness, of the overriding of duty by the short dim-eyed
selfishness of the moment. He had been accustomed to frequent a tavern,
where the talk turned mostly upon topics which men with much
self-respect put as far from them, as men with little self-respect will
allow them to do. "I formed my fashion of thinking from what I perceived
to reign among people who were at bottom extremely worthy folk, and I
said to myself, Since it is the usage of the country, as one lives here,
one may as well follow it. So I made up my mind to it cheerfully, and
without the least scruple."[140] By and by he proceeded to cover this
nude and intelligible explanation with finer phrases, about preferring
that his children should be trained up as workmen and peasants rather
than as adventurers and fortune-hunters, and about his supposing that in
sending them to the hospital for foundlings he was enrolling himself a
citizen in Plato's Republic.[141] This is hardly more than the talk of
one become famous, who is defending the acts of his obscurity on the
high principles which fame requires. People do not turn citizens of
Plato's Republic "cheerfully and without the least scruple," and if a
man frequents company where the despatch of inconvenient children to the
hospital was an accepted point of common practice, it is superfluous to
drag Plato and his Republic into the matter. Another turn again was
given to his motives when his mind had become clouded by suspicious
mania. Writing a year or two before his death he had assured himself
that his determining reason was the fear of a destiny for his children a
thousand times worse than the hard life of foundlings, namely, being
spoiled by their mother, being turned into monsters by her family, and
finally being taught to hate and betray their father by his plotting
enemies.[142] This is obviously a mixture in his mind of the motives
which led to the abandonment of the children and justified the act to
himself at the time, with the circumstances that afterwards reconciled
him to what he had done; for now he neither had any enemies plotting
against him, nor did he suppose that he had. As for his wife's family,
he showed himself quite capable, when the time came, of dealing
resolutely and shortly with their importunities in his own case, and he
might therefore well have trusted his power to deal with them in the
case of his children. He was more right when in 1770, in his important
letter to M. de St. Germain, he admitted that example, necessity, the
honour of her who was dear to him, all united to make him entrust his
children to the establishment provided for that purpose, and kept him
from fulfilling the first and holiest of natural duties. "In this, far
from excusing, I accuse myself; and when my reason tells me that I did
what I ought to have done in my situation, I believe that less than my
heart, which bitterly belies it."[143] This coincides with the first
undisguised account given in the Confessions, which has been already
quoted, and it has not that flawed ring of cant and fine words which
sounds through nearly all his other references to this great stain upon
his life, excepting one, and this is the only further document with
which we need concern ourselves. In that,[144] which was written while
the unholy work was actually being done, he states very distinctly that
the motives were those which are more or less closely connected with
most unholy works, motives of money--the great instrument and measure of
our personal convenience, the quantitative test of our self-control in
placing personal convenience behind duty to other people. "If my misery
and my misfortunes rob me of the power of fulfilling a duty so dear,
that is a calamity to pity me for, rather than a crime to reproach me
with. I owe them subsistence, and I procured a better or at least a
surer subsistence for them than I could myself have provided; this
condition is above all others." Next comes the consideration of their
mother, whose honour must be kept. "You know my situation; I gained my
bread from day to day painfully enough; how then should I feed a family
as well? And if I were compelled to fall back on the profession of
author, how would domestic cares and the confusion of children leave me
peace of mind enough in my garret to earn a living? Writings which
hunger dictates are hardly of any use, and such a resource is speedily
exhausted. Then I should have to resort to patronage, to intrigue, to
tricks ... in short to surrender myself to all those infamies, for which
I am penetrated with such just horror. Support myself, my children, and
their mother on the blood of wretches? No, madame, it were better for
them to be orphans than to have a scoundrel for their father.... Why
have I not married, you will ask? Madame, ask it of your unjust laws. It
was not fitting for me to contract an eternal engagement; and it will
never be proved to me that my duty binds me to it. What is certain is
that I have never done it, and that I never meant to do it. But we ought
not to have children when we cannot support them. Pardon me, madame;
nature means us to have offspring, since the earth produces sustenance
enough for all; but it is the rich, it is your class, which robs mine of
the bread of my children.... I know that foundlings are not delicately
nurtured; so much the better for them, they become more robust. They
have nothing superfluous given to them, but they have everything that is
necessary. They do not make gentlemen of them, but peasants or
artisans.... They would not know how to dance, or ride on horseback, but
they would have strong unwearied legs. I would neither make authors of
them, nor clerks; I would not practise them in handling the pen, but the
plough, the file, and the plane, instruments for leading a healthy,
laborious, innocent life.... I deprived myself of the delight of seeing
them, and I have never tasted the sweetness of a father's embrace. Alas,
as I have already told you, I see in this only a claim on your pity, and
I deliver them from misery at my own expense."[145] We may see here that
Rousseau's sophistical eloquence, if it misled others, was at least as
powerful in misleading himself, and it may be noted that this letter,
with its talk of the children of the rich taking bread out of the mouths
of the children of the poor, contains the first of those socialistic
sentences by which the writer in after times gained so famous a name. It
is at any rate clear from this that the real motive of the abandonment
of the children was wholly material. He could not afford to maintain
them, and he did not wish to have his comfort disturbed by
their presence.
There is assuredly no word to be said by any one with firm reason and
unsophisticated conscience in extenuation of this crime. We have only to
remember that a great many other persons in that lax time, when the
structure of the family was undermined alike in practice and
speculation, were guilty of the same crime; that Rousseau, better than
they, did not erect his own criminality into a social theory, but was
tolerably soon overtaken by a remorse which drove him both to confess
his misdeed, and to admit that it was inexpiable; and that the atrocity
of the offence owes half the blackness with which it has always been
invested by wholesome opinion, to the fact that the offender was by and
by the author of the most powerful book by which parental duty has been
commended in its full loveliness and nobility. And at any rate, let
Rousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen,
sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and
rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if
they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions,
still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens
on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of
squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is
far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public
institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without
regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if
afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum on
the one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of a
poverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to give
people who act as Rousseau acted, all that credit for self-denial and
high moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. It
really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the
deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau
did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted
maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the
spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to
the gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of
religious unction.
In 1761 the Maréchale de Luxembourg made efforts to discover Rousseau's
children, but without success. They were gone beyond hope of
identification, and the author of _Emitius_ and his sons and daughters
lived together in this world, not knowing one another. Rousseau with
singular honesty did not conceal his satisfaction at the fruitlessness
of the charitable endeavours to restore them to him. "The success of
your search," he wrote, "could not give me pure and undisturbed
pleasure; it is too late, too late.... In my present condition this
search interested me more for another person [Theresa] than myself; and
considering the too easily yielding character of the person in question,
it is possible that what she had found already formed for good or for
evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite
of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of a
nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank
eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and
changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too
self-centred and too passionate for warm ease and fulness of life in all
things, to be truly sympathetic with a condition whose feebleness and
immaturity touch us with half-painful hope.
Rousseau speaks in the Confessions of having married Theresa
five-and-twenty years after the beginning of their acquaintance,[147]
but we hardly have to understand that any ceremony took place which
anybody but himself would recognise as constituting a marriage. What
happened appears to have been this. Seated at table with Theresa and two
guests, one of them the mayor of the place, he declared that she was his
wife. "This good and seemly engagement was contracted," he says, "in all
the simplicity but also in all the truth of nature, in the presence of
two men of worth and honour.... During the short and simple act, I saw
the honest pair melted in tears."[148] He had at this time whimsically
assumed the name of Renou, and he wrote to a friend that of course he
had married in this name, for he adds, with the characteristic insertion
of an irrelevant bit of magniloquence, "it is not names that are
married; no, it is persons." "Even if in this simple and holy ceremony
names entered as a constituent part, the one I bear would have sufficed,
since I recognise no other. If it were a question of property to be
assured, then it would be another thing, but you know very well that is
not our case."[149] Of course, this may have been a marriage according
to the truth of nature, and Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites
as more sacramental performers, but it is clear from his own words about
property that there was no pretence of a marriage in law. He and Theresa
were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time,[150] and
Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived
himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must
magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and
conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.
* * * * *
We have, however, been outstripping slow-footed destiny, and have now to
return to the time when Theresa did not drink brandy, nor run after
stable-boys, nor fill Rousseau's soul with bitterness and suspicion, but
sat contentedly with him in an evening taking a stoic's meal in the
window of their garret on the fourth floor, seasoning it with
"confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul," and that general comfort of
sensation which, as we know to our cost, is by no means an invariable
condition either of duty done externally or of spiritual growth within.
It is perhaps hard for us to feel that we are in the presence of a great
religious reactionist; there is so little sign of the higher graces of
the soul, there are so many signs of the lowering clogs of the flesh.
But the spirit of a man moves in mysterious ways, and expands like the
plants of the field with strange and silent stirrings. It is one of the
chief tests of worthiness and freedom from vulgarity of soul in us, to
be able to have faith that this expansion is a reality, and the most
important of all realities. We do not rightly seize the type of Socrates
if we can never forget that he was the husband of Xanthippe, nor David's
if we can only think of him as the murderer of Uriah, nor Peter's if we
can simply remember that he denied his master. Our vision is only
blindness, if we can never bring ourselves to see the possibilities of
deep mystic aspiration behind the vile outer life of a man, or to
believe that this coarse Rousseau, scantily supping with his coarse
mate, might yet have many glimpses of the great wide horizons that are
haunted by figures rather divine than human.
FOOTNOTES:
[104] In theory he was even now curiously prudent and almost
sagacious; witness the Projet pour l'Education, etc., submitted to M.
de Mably, and printed in the volume of his Works entitled _Mélanges_,
pp. 106-136. In the matter of Latin, it may be worth noting that
Rousseau rashly or otherwise condemns the practice of writing it, as a
vexatious superfluity (p. 132).
[105] _Conf._, vi. 471.
[106] _Ib._, vi. 472-475; vii. 8.
[107] _Conf._, vii. 18, 19.
[108] Musset-Pathay (ii. 72) quotes the passage from Lord
Chesterfield's Letters, where the writer suggests Madame Dupin as a
proper person with whom his son might in a regular and business-like
manner open the elevating game of gallant intrigue.
[109] M. Dupin deserves honourable mention as having helped the
editors of the Encyclopædia by procuring information for them as to
salt-works (D'Alembert's _Discours Préliminaire_). His son M. Dupin de
Francueil, it may be worth noting, is a link in the genealogical chain
between two famous personages. In 1777, the year before Rousseau's
death, he married (in the chapel of the French embassy in London)
Aurora de Saxe, a natural daughter of the marshal, himself the natural
son of August the Strong, King of Poland. From this union was born
Maurice Dupin, and Maurice Dupin was the father of Madame George Sand.
M. Francueil died in 1787.
[110] _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 176.
[111] _Ib._ vol. i. ch. iv. pp. 178, 179.
[112] _Conf._, vii. 46, 51, 52, etc. A diplomatic piece in Rousseau's
handwriting has been found in the archives of the French consulate at
Constantinople, as M. Girardin informs us. Voltaire unworthily spread
the report that Rousseau had been the ambassador's private attendant.
For Rousseau's reply to the calumny, see _Corr._, v. 75 (Jan. 5,
1767); also iv. 150.
[113] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 55 _seq._
[114] _Conf._, vii. 92.
[115] _Conf._, vii. 38, 39.
[116] _Lettres de la Montagne_, iii. 266.
[117] _Conf._, vii. 75-84. Also a second example, 84-86. For Byron's
opinion of one of these stories, see Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi.
132. (Ed. 1837.)
[118] _Lettre sur la Musique Française_ (1753), p. 186.
[119] _Conf._, ix. 232.
[120] _Ib._ vii. 97.
[121] Hôtel St. Quentin, rue des Cordiers, a narrow street running
between the rue St. Jacques and the rue Victor Cousin. The still
squalid hostelry is now visible as Hôtel J.J. Rousseau. There is some
doubt whether he first saw Theresa in 1743 or 1745. The account in Bk.
vii. of the _Confessions_ is for the latter date (see also _Corr._,
ii. 207), but in the well-known letter to her in 1769 (_Ib._ vi. 79),
he speaks of the twenty-six years of their union. Their so-called
marriage took place in 1768, and writing in that year he speaks of the
five-and-twenty years of their attachment (_Ib._ v. 323), and in the
_Confessions_ (ix. 249) he fixes their marriage at the same date; also
in the letter to Saint-Germain (vi. 152). Musset-Pathay, though giving
1745 in one place (i. 45), and 1743 in another (ii. 198), has with
less than his usual care paid no attention to the discrepancy.
[122] _Conf._, vii. 97-100.
[123] _Conf._, vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be
interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: "Mesiceuras ancor
mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous
la goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e
rus pour vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous
paleu ces paes mes le vre ... ge sui avestous lamities e la reu conec
caceu posible e la tacheman mon cher bonnamies votreau enble e bon
amiess theress le vasseur." Of which dark words this is the
interpretation:--"Mais il sera encore mieux remis quand je sera auprès
de vous, et de vous témoigner toute la joie et la tendresse de mon
coeur que vous connaissez que j'ai toujours eue pour vous, et qui ne
finira qu'au tombeau; c'est mon coeur qui vous parle, c'est pas mes
lèvres.... Je suis avec toute l'amitié et la reconnaissance possibles,
et l'attachement, mon cher bon ami, votre humble et bonne amie,
Thérèse Le Vasseur." (_Rousseau, ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, ii. 450.)
Certainly it was not learning and arts which hindered Theresa's
manners from being pure.
[124] _Oeuv. et Corr. Inéd._, 365.
[125] _Conf._, vii. 102. See also _Corr._, v. 373 (Oct. 10, 1768). On
the other hand, _Conf._, ix. 249.
[126] M. St. Marc Girardin, in one of his admirable papers on
Rousseau, speaks of him as "a bourgeois unclassed by an alliance with
a tavern servant" (_Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Nov. 1852, p. 759); but
surely Rousseau had unclassed himself long before, in the houses of
Madame Vercellis, Count Gouvon, and even Madame de Warens, and by his
repudiation, from the time when he ran away from Geneva, of nearly
every bourgeois virtue and bourgeois prejudice.
[127] _Conf._, vii. 11. Also footnote.
[128] _Rêveries_, ix. 309.
[129] _Conf._, viii. 142, 143.
[130] The other day I came for the first time upon the following in
the sayings of Madame de Lambert:--"Ce ne sont pas toujours les fautes
qui nous perdent; c'est la manière de se conduire aprés les avoir
faites." [1877.]
[131] _Conf._, xii. 187, 188.
[132] _Ib._, viii. 221.
[133] Bernardin de St. Pierre, _Oeuv._, xii. 103. See _Conf._, xii
188, and _Corr._, v. 324.
[134] Referring, no doubt, to the ceremony which he called their
marriage, and which had taken place in 1768.
[135] _Corr._, vi. 79-86. August 12, 1769.
[136] Composed in 1745. The _Fêtes de Ramire_ was represented at
Versailles at the very end of this year.
[137] Some time in 1746-7. _Conf._, vii. 113, 114.
[138] Probably in the winter of 1746-7. _Corr._, ii. 207. _Conf._,
vii. 120-124. _Ib._, viii. 148. _Corr._, ii. 208. June 12, 1761, to
the Maréchale de Luxembourg.
[139] George Sand,--in an eloquent piece entitled _À Propos des
Charmettes (Revue des Deux Mondes_, November 15, 1863), in which she
expresses her own obligations to Jean Jacques. In 1761 Rousseau
declares that he had never hitherto had the least reason to suspect
Theresa's fidelity. _Corr._, ii. 209
[140] _Conf._, vii. 123.
[141] _Ib._, viii. 145-151.
[142] _Rêveries_, ix. 313. The same reason is given, _Conf._, ix. 252;
also in Letter to Madame B., January 17, 1770 (_Corr._, vi. 117).
[143] _Corr._, vi. 152, 153. Feb. 27, 1770.
[144] Letter to Madame de Francueil, April 20, 1751. _Corr._, i. 151.
[145] _Corr._, i. 151-155
[146] August 10, 1761. _Corr._, ii. 220. The Maréchale de Luxembourg's
note on the subject, to which this is a reply, is given in _Rousseau,
ses Amis et ses Ennemis_, i. 444.
[147] _Conf._, x. 249. See above, p. 106, _n._
[148] To Lalliaud, Aug 31, 1768. _Corr._, v. 324. See also D'Escherny,
quoted in Musset-Pathay, i. 169, 170.
[149] To Du Peyrou, Sept. 26, 1768. _Corr._, v. 360.
[150] To Mdlle. Le Vasseur, July 25, 1768. _Corr._, v. 116-119.