CHAPTER VII.

THE HERMITAGE.

It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the

Encyclopædia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of those scenes

which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp of

humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and with

adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortification

of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of firm hope

and beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth century were

centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of that

epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled away from the

impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of satisfied

conviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them--Wordsworth, the

poetic hermit of our lakes--impresses us in any degree like one of the

great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the

unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and

about their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the

preacher who declared all the things that are under the sun to be

vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things that

are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the light

of a celestial brightness to come.

Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society

and circumstance, still contained a strong positive element in his

native exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not

leave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted.

The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life

extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure

of a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the

general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded

with the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but

an essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he

says, when making excursions into the country with great people, "I was

so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds,

and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so

worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs,

great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a

farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour

of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain

of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of

rouge and furbelows."[254] He was no anchorite proper, one weary of the

world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one

kind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he was now

about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his

inveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace a

past. He forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tender

benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in her hovel, his

house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot,

too, that since those days the various processes of intellectual life

had expanded within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes a

man's surroundings very critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportion

as a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on anything

external, whether on the greenness of the field or the gaiety of the

street or the constancy of friends, so comes he nearer to chance of

making shipwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very root of the tragedy

lay deeper,--in temperament.

I.

Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls

of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). "Although it was cold, and

snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life;

violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were

beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the

first song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood

that touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I

was transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in

an instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. My

very first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic

objects about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my

quarters, I first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path

nor a copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out

before the end of the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than

wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no one could

ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from Paris."[255]

This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the

end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was

too soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the

stimulus given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he

found himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that

which had seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded

the usage and costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive an

angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.

Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this

austerity. No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes,

he no longer cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. "When I

did not see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad

before my eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it is

for hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no

distinction between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, so

much more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm

that had long transported me."[256] That is to say, his nature remained

for a moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment.

And in studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this

critical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase.

Once more we are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or

spiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a passing mood, a

personality accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim

and fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most

deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of

a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be no

normally composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich

life of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of the

town passed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept

the stoic into space, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled

triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and

bitterness.

At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him

gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him

from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by

recollection of the days that he had passed in the woods of Montmorency,

with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. "As I got up with

the sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was going

to be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might come

to disturb its charm. After having given the morning to divers tasks

which I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them off

to another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape

from the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before one

o'clock, even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of

the sun, along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one

should lay hold of me before I could get away. But when I had once

passed a certain corner, with what beating of the heart, with what

radiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and my

own master for the rest of the day! Then with easier pace I went in

search of some wild and desert spot in the forest, where there was

nothing to show the hand of man, or to speak of servitude and

domination; some refuge where I could fancy myself its discoverer, and

where no inopportune third person came to interfere between nature and

me. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a magnificence that was

always new. The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struck

my eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very heart; the

majesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the delicacy of

the shrubs that surrounded me, the astonishing variety of grasses and

flowers that I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual alternation

of attention and delight.... My imagination did not leave the earth thus

superbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming society, of

which I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden age to please my

own fancy, and filling up these fair days with all those scenes of my

life that had left sweet memories behind, and all that my heart could

yet desire or hope in scenes to come, I waxed tender even to shedding

tears over the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so delicious, so

pure, and henceforth so far from the reach of men. Ah, if in such

moments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my little aureole as author,

came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out, to

deliver myself without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of which

I was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of my

chimeras sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream had

suddenly been transformed into reality, it would not have been enough;

I should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still." Alas, this deep

insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulness

of animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination,

was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his

conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short space

by that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old

theology into the living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the

earth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the

universal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces

all. Then with mind lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not

reason, I did not philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt

overwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to the

ravishing confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in

imagination in immeasurable space; within the limits of real existences

my heart was too tightly compressed; in the universe I was stifled; I

would fain have launched myself into the infinite. I believe that if I

had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I should have found myself in

a less delicious situation than that bewildering ecstasy to which my

mind so unreservedly delivered itself, and which sometimes transported

me until I cried out, 'O mighty Being! O mighty Being!' without power of

any other word or thought."[257]

It is not wholly insignificant that though he could thus expand his

soul with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endure

the sight of one of his fellow-creatures. "If my gaiety lasted the whole

night, that showed that I had passed the day alone; I was very different

after I had seen people, for I was rarely content with others and never

with myself. Then in the evening I was sure to be in taciturn or

scolding humour." It is not in every condition that effervescent passion

for ideal forms of the religious imagination assists sympathy with the

real beings who surround us. And to this let us add that there are

natures in which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the

ideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to

them as something alien; and this without the least insincerity, though

with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to

this class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was,

it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it

was one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of his

spirit with a force as genuine as that which is kindled in natures of

another type by sympathy with the real and concrete, with the daily walk

and conversation and actual doings and sufferings of the men and women

whom we know. The fermentation which followed his arrival at the

Hermitage, in its first form produced a number of literary schemes. The

idea of the Political Institutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed

upon his meditations. He had been earnestly requested to compose a

treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly

round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the

Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the

influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons,

food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus

indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of

modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer

of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system

of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the

soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.[258] Though the

treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we

perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to

character wide enough, and the material influences that impress it and

produce its caprices, multitudinous enough, instead of limiting them

with the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the

conditions that affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in

which he sketches his project in the least justify the attribution to

him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical constitution

over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or a

discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one denies

the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau

says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the

modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for a

spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation.

A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit

the papers and printed works of the Abbé de Saint Pierre (1658-1743),

confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of

Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.[259] This

task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from

twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and

repetition. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of

perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort;

and he soon found out that the Abbé de Saint Pierre's views were

impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are

guided rather by their lights than by their passions. In fact, Saint

Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar

degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for

the extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected

reason is capable of being made the base of all institutions, and would

speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went wrong,"

says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other passion but that of

reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of

taking them as they are and as they will continue to be." The critic's

own error in later days was not very different from this, save that it

applied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by

refusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points

for higher attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the

old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory,

speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of

enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards

inanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make

the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in

number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could

with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up the

task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that

fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed

no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in

finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint

Pierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France,

some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been

punished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as a

kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to

say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to

what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and

hence the latter, in publishing Saint Pierre's strictures on French

affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a

country that did not concern him. "It surprised me," says Rousseau,

"that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier," but this

coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with the

discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise nobody versed in study

of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to

dislike to admit it.

The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint

Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality

of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show

us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to

make to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's

fault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views

relative to men, to times, to circumstances; and there is something that

startles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration

that, "whether an existing government be still that of old times, or

whether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally

imprudent to touch it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and if

it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circumstance,

and human sagacity is powerless." Rousseau points to France, asking his

readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous

masses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a

wise general remark on the futility of political machinery without men

of a certain character, he illustrates it by this scornful question:

When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit,

and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the

interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope

from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing

them from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps not one

of these pages which Burke might not well have owned.[262]

A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful

effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find

that if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there

is evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is

only a little serious, so there is evil in a passionate tenderness for

phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure

or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the

imagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the

strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of

his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually

rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not

either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are such

states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature should

have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may be

presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we

meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger

in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness,

viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the

third person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the

man's." In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor

magic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood," but the too

potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a

mental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circumstance had

ever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected against

this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while

even those who are born with senses and appetites of great strength and

keenness, are guarded by accumulated discipline of all kinds from

without, especially by the necessity for active industry which brings

the most exaggerated native sensibility into balance. It is the constant

and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses

from making furious rout. Rousseau had just repudiated all social

obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was at

an age when passion that has never been broken in has the beak of the

bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in

fair shapes.

Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in the month

of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale and

the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear," he began to wonder

restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid

sentiments which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of

that intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his

soul. Why had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left

thus unused and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this of

a certain injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he

loved to let flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth

down to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his

brain. He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had

known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His

imagination was kindled into deadly activity. "The impossibility of

reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and

seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I

nourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soon

peopled with beings after my heart's desire. In my continual ecstasies,

I made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that

ever entered the heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human

race, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly

for their virtues as their beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends,

such as I never found in our nether world. I had such a passion for

haunting this empyrean with all its charming objects, that I passed

hours and days in it without counting them as they went by; and losing

recollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hot

haste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves.

If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw unhappy

mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither moderate

nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to give

them greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal."[263]

This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the

tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young,

and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of

nature made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been

attended with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in

devout acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the

goodness and bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more

pitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only

not a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh.

Nature without the association of some living human object, like Madame

de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which

slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our

present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost

mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, but

far less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject

all his life long. It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves.

"Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my

imagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees,

languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams." This interval he

employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of

Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine.

The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, the

transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort in

the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these

over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions

by associating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by

introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which

prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The

egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than

the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural

objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous

force. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and

the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the

other quick, analogous in character but different, not handsome but

animated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave a lover,

to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after much

deliberation and some changes, on the shores of his beloved lake at

Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always

thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.

This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain

amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral

convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets,

assigning this or that thought or expression to one or other of the

three companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was

confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his

ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his

Musical Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer

possible. The fever of that literary composition of which he had always

such dread had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any

side but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by

his imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance

was vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts

"so as to produce a kind of romance." We have a glimpse of his mental

state in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on

anything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with

which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he

tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.[264] The distance from all

this to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not

be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other

Plutarchians. "My great embarrassment," he says honestly, "was that I

should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe

principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the

austere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting

invectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft

delights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for,

than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors

on whose books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this

inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over

it, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to

reason."[265] He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the

New Heloïsa was turning his madness to the best account. That may be

true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter

to D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation a

considerable element in literature or the drama, at the very time when

he was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of his

century, a rather indecent piece of invective? We may forgive

inconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories, or two

self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the form

of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.

We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance

with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M.

d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two

ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom

among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They were

curious to see the eccentric man," as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his

scandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to

parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections. "He was

walking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand;

he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and

stalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the

miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and

quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of

even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more

glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of this

scene of high morals.

II.

The New Heloïsa was not to be completed without a further extension of

morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of

compressed passion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air

swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again

began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire

of a consuming passion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream.

In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the

sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay.[267] Her husband had gone to the war

(we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert,

whose passion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Châtelet eight

years before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house

not very far off, where she was to pass her retreat during the absence

of her two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various

occasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had

partaken of its host's homely fare.[268] But the time was not ripe; the

force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too,

depended with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a

very ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite

herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His

fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female

cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication,

which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited

the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the first

interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had

thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay

weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the

sorceress he wept in the woods.[269] He talked to himself for hours, and

was of a black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object of

this deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved.

He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture,

commixed with sicklier delight.

People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will,

emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its

convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all

blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in

slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the

blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant

unmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brute

in spring-time, it would be less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the

ever-struggling reason of man or woman in the grip of the foul thing,

produces an aggravation of frenzy that makes the mental healer tremble.

Add to all this lurking elements of hollow rage that his passion was not

returned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he could

not take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was a

little despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw that

his hairs were sprinkled with gray,--and the whole offers a scene of

moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away with

dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scaly

shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.

Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious

hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in

physical or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox,

the terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a

yellowish tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow

low; she was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by

an excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and

caressing expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free

sprightliness of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was

very slight, and there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and

grace. She was natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a

modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimes

found vent. Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it from

yielding to any impulse of mirth. "She weeps with the best faith in the

world, and breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody so

happily born," says her much less amiable sister-in-law.[270] Her

husband was indifferent to her. He preserved an attachment to a lady

whom he knew before his marriage, whose society he never ceased to

frequent, and who finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot

found consolation in the friendship of Saint Lambert. "We both of us,"

said her husband, "both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for

fidelity, only there was a mis-arrangement." She occasionally composed

verses of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to

write them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and

wit.[271] Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of

Leipsic, preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day,

for instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going on

as to the various merits and defects of women; she heard much, and then

with her accustomed suavity of voice contributed this light

summary:--"Without women, the life of man would be without aid at the

beginning, without pleasure in the middle, and without solace at the

end."[272]

We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sort

that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness,

frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion

united every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau

would be least likely to miss. The bond of union between them was

subtle. She found in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the

story of her passion for Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious force

produced in him a thrill which he never felt with any one else before or

after. Thus, as he says, there was equally love on both sides, though it

was not reciprocal. "We were both of us intoxicated with passion, she

for her lover, I for her; our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tender

confidants, each of the other, our sentiments were of such close kin

that it was impossible for them not to mix; and still she never forgot

her duty for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear, that if

sometimes drawn astray by my senses, still"--still he was a paragon of

virtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the author

of the New Heloïsa; we can appreciate the author of Emilius; but this

strained attempt to confound those two very different persons by

combining tearful erotics with high ethics, is an exhibition of

self-delusion that the most patient analyst of human nature might well

find hard to suffer. "The duty of privation exalted my soul. The glory

of all the virtues adorned the idol of my heart in my sight; to soil its

divine image would have been to annihilate it," and so forth.[273]

Moon-lighted landscape gave a background for the sentimentalist's

picture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and the soft rustle of the

night air, made up a scene which became for its chief actor "an immortal

memory of innocence and delight." "It was in this grove, seated with her

on a grassy bank, under an acacia heavy with flowers, that I found

expression for the emotions of my heart in words that were worthy of

them. 'Twas the first and single time of my life; but I was sublime, if

you can use the word of all the tender and seductive things that the

most glowing love can bring into the heart of a man. What intoxicating

tears I shed at her knees, what floods she shed in spite of herself! At

length in an involuntary transport, she cried out, 'Never was man so

tender, never did man love as you do! But your friend Saint Lambert

hears us, and my heart cannot love twice.'"[274] Happily, as we learn

from another source, a breath of wholesome life from without brought the

transcendental to grotesque end. In the climax of tears and

protestations, an honest waggoner at the other side of the park wall,

urging on a lagging beast launched a round and far-sounding oath out

into the silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with a lively

continuous peal of young laughter, while an angry chill brought back the

discomfited lover from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.[275]

Rousseau wrote in the New Heloïsa very sagely that you should grant to

the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits that

the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot.

Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather

than to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see.

Honest pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle and

unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity

of emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and

she wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. "His madness must be very strong,"

said Saint Lambert, "since she can perceive it."[276]

Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a

fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of passion

by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and

garnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered

unseen. In short, such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first

stage marked by ravishing delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel. When

a man lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct

appointed by his relations with others, still the reality of such

relations survives. He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save

him either from his own passion, or from some degree of that kinship

with others which instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of brass

around him. Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer

most from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had

innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that

the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious

of having fallen at all.

One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found

Madame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her

cheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter

was carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was

that Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the

viciousness of her relations with her lover.[277] "They have played us

an evil turn," cried Madame d'Houdetot; "they have been unjust to me,

but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what you

ought to be."[278] This was Rousseau's first taste of the ashes of

shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked at

the expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed. Mortification of

the considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after this lapse,

was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was pointed by

the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his monitress was

younger than himself. He could never master his own contempt for the

gallantry of grizzled locks.[279] His austerer self might at any rate

have been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of the

end, though the end came without any seeking on his part and without

violence. To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot

came to the Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to the

credit of human nature's elasticity, the three passed a delightful

afternoon. The wronged lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he

passed occasional slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven,

if he had not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep,

as we can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his

very inadequate justification of Providence against Voltaire.[280]

In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of

his mad passion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it

involved the perilous assistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately her

loyalty and good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found,

or thought he found her distracted, emharrassed, indifferent. In despair

at not being allowed to heal his passionate malady in his own fashion,

he did the most singular thing that he could have done under the

circumstances. He wrote to Saint Lambert.[281] His letter is a prodigy

of plausible duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states had

so little sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary,

and was moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, that

it is hard to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was his

own dupe. Voluntary or not, it is detestable. We pass the false whine

about "being abandoned by all that was dear to him," as if he had not

deliberately quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend he

had; about his being "solitary and sad," as if he was not ready at this

very time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered

him of a single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored.

Remembering the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read

this:--"Whence comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you can

have suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in

consequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue? A passage in one of your

letters shows a glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert,

the breast of J.J. Rousseau never held the heart of a traitor, and I

should despise myself more than you suppose, if I had ever tried to rob

you of her heart.... Can you suspect that her friendship for me may hurt

her love for you? Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open to

all sorts of affections, and no sentiment can spring up in them which

does not turn to the advantage of the dominant passion. Where is the

lover who does not wax the more tender as he talks to his friend of her

whom he loves? And is it not sweeter for you in your banishment that

there should be some sympathetic creature to whom your mistress loves to

talk of you, and who loves to hear?"

Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which the

sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend's

mistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two passages from

a letter to her; as when he cries, "Ah, how proud would even thy lover

himself be of thy constancy, if he only knew how much it has

surmounted.... I appeal to your sincerity. You, the witness and the

cause of this delirium, these tears, these ravishing ecstasies, these

transports which were never made for mortal, say, have I ever tasted

your favours in such a way that I deserve to lose them?... Never once

did my ardent desires nor my tender supplications dare to solicit

supreme happiness, without my feeling stopped by the inner cries of a

sorrow-stricken soul.... O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea of

eternal privation is too frightful for one who groans that he cannot

identify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be

lowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What,

are my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along

with my kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, that

rapid and devouring fire, swifter than lightning?"[282].... We see a

sympathetic creature assuredly, and listen to the voice of a nature

endowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency,

loyalty, above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough.

One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. He

takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of

his principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law

as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so

attached to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. "Do not

suppose," he says, with superlative gravity, "that you have seduced me

by your reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not your

justification. I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardly

approve it yourself; and so long as you both of you continue dear to me,

I will never leave you in careless security as to the innocence of your

state. Yet love such as yours deserves considerateness.... I feel

respect for a union so tender, and cannot bring myself to attempt to

lead it to virtue along the path of despair" (p. 401).

Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from

appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to

virtue along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much

as he could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense.

Saint Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a

certain manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which his

correspondent only felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lambert

took all the blame on himself. He had desired that his mistress and his

friend should love one another; then he thought he saw some coolness in

his mistress, and he set the change down to his friend, though not on

the true grounds. "Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a

traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken to

me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found hard to

bear." In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being

over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a

connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or

religion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had

ceased to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might be

spared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and

conscience in so austere an adviser.[283]

It is well known how effectively one with a germ of good principle in

him is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in

his hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last

interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less

wise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As it

was, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm,

infinitely more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which had

seized him before. They formed the project of a close companionship of

three, including the absent lover; and they counted on the project

coming more true than such designs usually do, "since all the feelings

that can unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it,

and we three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to

suffice to ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others."

What happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or four

months, which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for then

the bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to be

borne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerate

letters that a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the most

petulant, suspicious, perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patience

and exquisite sweetness of friendship some of these letters are

matchless, and we can only conjecture the wearing querulousness of the

letters to which they were replies. If through no fault of her own she

had been the occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shook

off the consequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counsel

and grave tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough of

suspicion and despair into which he was plunged.[284] In the beginning

of 1758 there was a change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow became

known to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was

the cause of a passing disturbance between him and his mistress. Saint

Lambert throughout acted like a man who is thoroughly master of himself.

At first, we learn, he ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue

which he sought in him, and which he was persuaded that he found in him.

"Since then, however," wrote Madame d'Houdetot, "he pities you more for

your weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from

joining the people who wish to blacken your character; we have and

always shall have the courage to speak of you with esteem."[285] They

saw one another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess

d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together,

happily without breach of the peace.[286] One curious thing about this

meeting was that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint

Lambert had interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with

Diderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.[287]

Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor

short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to have

lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to

have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of

the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent

good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may

serve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, when

it no longer suits them to see one another.[288] It is at least certain

that in them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends

that he ever possessed.

III.

The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with

catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished

itself in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a

silent and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something

of acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous

process was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders.

This disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from

his infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing

man to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the

history of a life is the history of a body no less than that of a soul.

Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two factions of

moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuities

of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have been nothing

more than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We are not to

suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on no man's

malformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it is

folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena. In

firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little

endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he

endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed

from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form

which this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintly

nature, but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his

quarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot--a tale of

labyrinthine nightmares--let us remember that we may even to this point

explain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of

insanity, unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many

sane people very uncomfortable.

His own account was this: "In my quality of solitary, I am more

sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the

world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions

make him forget it for the rest of the day; but there is nothing to

distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy

myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with

him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, and

the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In my

quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity

owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend,

who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an

unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?"[289]

We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but

it explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable

insanity. Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation,

public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension.

Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing

his temperament, his previous history, his circumstances, we have no

difficulty in accounting for his conduct. Least of all is there any need

for laying all the blame upon his friends. There are writers whom

enthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical

denigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say,

nearly every one whom he ever knew.[290] Diderot said well, "Too many

honest people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right."

The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages

during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame

d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature

unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that

attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a

friend. He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once

struck him, as he did into the Encyclopædia. We have already seen how

warmly he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he

scolded and laughed at him for turning hermit. With still more

seriousness he remonstrated with him for remaining in the country

through the winter, thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother.

This stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter

letters were interchanged,[291] those of Diderot being pronounced by a

person who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too harsh.[292] Yet

there is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only the

man to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairs

as the worst of injuries. "I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him

sincerely," says Rousseau, "and I counted with entire confidence upon

the same sentiments in him. But worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in

everlastingly thwarting my tastes, my inclinations, my ways of living,

everything that concerned myself only; revolted at seeing a younger man

than myself insist with all his might on governing me like a child;

chilled by his readiness in giving his promise and his negligence in

keeping it; tired of so many appointments which he made and broke, and

of his fancy for repairing them by new ones to be broken in their turn;

provoked at waiting for him to no purpose three or four times a month on

days which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the evening, after going

on as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for him all day,--I had

my heart already full of a multitude of grievances."[293] This

irritation subsided in presence of the storms that now rose up against

Diderot. He was in the thick of the dangerous and mortifying

distractions stirred up by the foes of the Encyclopædia. Rousseau in

friendly sympathy went to see him; they embraced, and old wrongs were

forgotten until new arose.[294]

There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns

two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris,

in order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear

Diderot's opinion of the two first parts of the New Heloïsa. She says

that he wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts

to Paris; Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot's

possession for six months.[295] As her letters containing this very

circumstantial story were written at the moment, it is difficult to

uphold the Confessions as valid authority against them. Thirdly,

Rousseau told her that he had not taken his manuscripts to Paris (p.

302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p. 309) mentions that he

has received a letter from Diderot, to the effect that Rousseau's visit

had no other object than the revision of these manuscripts. The scene is

characteristic. "Rousseau kept him pitilessly at work from Saturday at

ten o'clock in the morning till eleven at night on Monday, hardly giving

him time to eat and drink. The revision at an end, Diderot chats with

him about a plan he has in his head, and begs Rousseau to help him in

contriving some incident which he cannot yet arrange to his taste. 'It

is too difficult,' replies the hermit coldly, 'it is late, and I am not

used to sitting up. Good night; I am off at six in the morning, and 'tis

time for bed.' He rises from his chair, goes to bed, and leaves Diderot

petrified at his behaviour. The day of his departure, Diderot's wife saw

that her husband was in bad spirits, and asked the reason. 'It is that

man's want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which afflicts me; he makes me

work like a slave, but I should never have found that out, if he had not

so drily refused to take an interest in me for a quarter of an hour.'

'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do you not know him? He

is devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when anything fine appears

that is not his own. You will see him one day commit some great crime

rather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not swear that he

will not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake their

vindication.'"

Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letters

long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to make

us perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood to

Madame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot.

I see no reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the

points of coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth

probable.[296]

Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and his

sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalent

opinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems to

have existed.[297] Those who disbelieved that he had reached this

distinction, yet made sure that he had a passion for her, which may or

may not have been true.[298] Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough to

be willing that this should be generally accepted, and it is certain

that she showed a friendship for him which, considering the manners of

the time, was invitingly open to misconception. Again, she was jealous

of her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than

that the latter, being the wife of a Norman noble, had access to the

court, and this was unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. Hence

Madame d'Epinay's barely-concealed mortification when she heard of the

meetings in the forest, the private suppers, the moonlight rambles in

the park. When Saint Lambert first became uneasy as to the relations

between Rousseau and his mistress, and wrote to her to say that he was

so, Rousseau instantly suspected that Madame d'Epinay had been his

informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by tales of baskets and

drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of Madame d'Houdetot's

letters to him. Whether these tales were true or not, we can never know;

we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably not incapable of these

meannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose that she took the

pains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news which she was

writing to Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication with Saint

Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to Saint

Lambert,[299] but it may be doubted whether Theresa's imagination could

have risen to such feat as writing to a marquis, and a marquis in what

would have seemed to her to be remote and inaccessible parts of the

earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for us; a puzzle that can

never be found out, nor be worth finding out. Rousseau was persuaded

that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was seized by one of his

blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an affectionate letter

from her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so long, he wrote thus:

"I can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am better informed, and

this I shall be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be certain that accused

innocence will find a champion ardent enough to make calumniators

repent, whoever they may be." It is rather curious that so strange a

missive as this, instead of provoking Madame d'Epinay to anger, was

answered by a warmer and more affectionate letter than the first. To

this Rousseau replied with increased vehemence, charged with dark and

mysteriously worded suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained willing to

receive him. He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because it would

certainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because, moreover,

he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any foundation. He

went instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at his approach she

threw herself on his neck and melted into tears. This unexpected

reception from so old a friend moved him extremely; he too wept

abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise nature of his

suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an end.[300]

Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years,

there had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their

characters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we

know,--sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the

difference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite;

judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German

(born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader to the Duke of Saxe

Gotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way, partly through the

friendship of Rousseau, into the society of the Parisian men of letters,

rapidly acquired a perfect mastery of the French language, and with the

inspiring help of Diderot, became an excellent critic. After being

secretary to sundry high people, he became the literary correspondent of

various German sovereigns, keeping them informed of what was happening

in the world of art and letters, just as an ambassador keeps his

government informed of what happens in politics. The sobriety,

impartiality, and discrimination of his criticism make one think highly

of his literary judgment; he had the courage, or shall we say he

preserved enough of the German, to defend both Homer and Shakespeare

against the unhappy strictures of Voltaire.[301] This is not all,

however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which impresses us with

the writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we have to add the

external corroboration that in the latter part of his life he filled

various official posts, which implied a peculiar confidence in his

probity on the part of those who appointed him. At the present moment

(1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estrées, commander of

the French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. He

was an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner,

powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the name

of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not

always beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than

too much in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which

there was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated

declamation. Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough

underneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singer

at the opera who had a thrilling voice. As he did not believe in the

metaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from

temperament the necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by

constant pressure from without. "I am surprised," Madame d'Epinay said

to him, "that men should be so little indulgent to one another." "Nay,

the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the

established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this

false principle of liberty." "Ah, but the contrary principle, by making

one too indulgent, disturbs order." "It does nothing of the kind. Though

man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of modification; you can

improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him. The gardener does

not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps

it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302] He applied

the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for social

crookedness.

It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would

gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a

weighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract

attention. Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to

remove Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his

friends. The attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret

allowance to her mother and her by Grimm and Diderot of some sixteen

pounds a year.[303] Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings

and goings and comings to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy.

That the suspicions in other respects were in a certain sense not wholly

unfounded, is shown by Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He

disapproved of her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her

in a very remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken his

imagination.[304] "He is a poor devil who torments himself, and does not

dare to confess the true subject of all his sufferings, which is in his

cursed head and his pride; he raises up imaginary matters, so as to have

the pleasure of complaining of the whole human race."[305] More than

once he assures her that Rousseau will end by going mad, it being

impossible that so hot and ill-organised a head should endure

solitude.[306] Rousseauite partisans usually explain all this by

supposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion,

against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and it is

possible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his natural

shrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of imagination and

a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to account for Grimm's

harsh judgment, without the addition of any sinister sentiment. He was

perfectly right in suspecting Rousseau of want of loyalty to Madame

d'Epinay, for we find our hermit writing to her in strains of perfect

intimacy, while he was writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as "your

unworthy sister."[307] On the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay was

overwhelming him with caressing phrases, she was at the same moment

describing him to Grimm as a master of impertinence and intractableness.

As usual where there is radical incompatibility of character, an

attempted reconciliation between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the

early part of October 1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathy

more resolute. Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his heart

he never thought himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on the

virtues of friendship and his own special aptitude for practising them.

He then conceded to the impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in a

slight embrace which was like the accolade given by a monarch to new

knights.[308] The whole scene is ignoble. We seem to be watching an

unclean cauldron, with Theresa's mother, a cringing and babbling crone,

standing witch-like over it and infusing suspicion, falsehood, and

malice. When minds are thus surcharged, any accident suffices to

release the evil creatures that lurk in an irritated imagination.

One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to his

unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with some

strange disorder, which made it advisable that she should start without

any delay for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin,

who was at that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise was

greatly increased by the expectation which he found among his friends

that he would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, by

offering to bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in a

town which was strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to

no purpose that he protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse

of another; and how great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in

the bad season, when for many days he was absolutely unable to leave his

chamber without danger. Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide a

friend's course, wrote him a letter urging that his many obligations,

and even his grievances in respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him to

accompany her, as he would thus repay the one and console himself for

the other. "She is going into a country where she will be like one

fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she will need amusement and

distraction. As for winter, are you worse now than you were a month

back, or than you will be at the opening of the spring? For me, I

confess that if I could not bear the coach, I would take a staff and

follow her on foot."[309] Rousseau trembled with fury, and as soon as

the transport was over, he wrote an indignant reply, in which he more or

less politely bade the panurgic one to attend to his own affairs, and

hinted that Grimm was making a tool of him. Next he wrote to Grimm

himself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his advice and

promising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By this time

he had found out the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed illness and

her anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the share

which Grimm had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of his

letter any the less ungracious or unseemly. "If Madame d'Epinay has

shown friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her.... As for benefits,

first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe no thanks

for any that people may burden me with by force. Madame d'Epinay, being

so often left alone in the country, wished me for company; it was for

that she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to friendship, I must

now make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must be without a

servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character,

before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's house.

For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage

with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and

cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion,

and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much

money an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the

kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country

and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is

greater on her side or mine." He then urges with a torrent of impetuous

eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for

him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay,

rich and surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the

philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and

wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his

five and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.[310]

The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed,

how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how

little such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing

this unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving him

sufficiently free to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn

lost all self-control, and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry

and resentful fancies. But let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to his

eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the effect that he would think the

matter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his

hermitage. Rousseau burning with excitement at once conceived a thousand

suspicions, wholly unable to understand that a cold and reserved German

might choose to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer with

brevity. "After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty in

which this barbarous man had plunged me"--that is after eight or ten

days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct

application for one.[311] It was short and extremely pointed, not

complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay but

protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to

him for not accompanying her. "It has made me quiver with indignation;

so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness and

duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for more

than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks of the

tenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at the

hands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myself

unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I

live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of

your conduct from my mind."[312] A flash of manly anger like this is

very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid

egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal

complaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In a

paroxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in

the same key. He wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in

shrieks. "Have I a single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one

word, and I can live." A day or two later: "Think of the state I am in.

I can bear to be abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so

well! Great God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313] And so on,

raving. It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing

letters, praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself

with, to remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, "who had never appeared

other than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him."[314] He

was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she

paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his

poverty.[315] To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his

tormenting uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his

letter. It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of

tyranny and intrigue at his cost. For the first time she replied with

spirit and warmth. "Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve

of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life repair the

wrongs he had done me." She then tersely remarks that it is not natural

to pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that

he abuses her patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness

that friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the

Hermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until the

spring he would with her permission follow their counsel. Then she, with

a final thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm:

"Since you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I

am astonished that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't

consult mine as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as

to yours." This was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble

petulance to dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a

misfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not

less cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two days before he

wrote, he left her house. He found a cottage at Montmorency, and

thither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he carried his scanty

household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).[316]

We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a

visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon

as he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and with his eyes all

aflame: "What have you come here for?" "I want to know whether you are

mad or malicious." "You have known me for fifteen years; you are well

aware how little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not

mad: follow me." He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded to

clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge of trying to make a

breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in fact

letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame

d'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and at

the same time to accept himself in the very same relation. Of all this

we have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the face of

Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which he

described in a letter to Grimm the same night. "I throw myself into your

arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes into my

work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul at my

side. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils and

hell."[317] And thus the unhappy man who had began this episode in his

life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring,

ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson of

the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggard

desperate gaze of a lost spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

[254] _Conf._, ix. 247.

[255] _Conf._, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (_Mém._, ii. 132) has given an

account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date. When

Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the

Hermitage--of which nothing now stands--along with the rest of the

estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers

by Robespierre, and afterwards by Grétry the composer, who paid 10,000

livres for it.

[256] _Conf._, ix. 255.

[257] Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.

[258] _Conf._, ix. 239.

[259] _Conf._, ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.

[260] The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the

Polysynodia, together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at

the end of the volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but

without the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's

permission, in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve

louis for publication in his journal only. _Conf._, xi. 107. _Corr._,

ii. 110, 128.

[261] P. 485.

[262] For a sympathetic account of the Abbé de Saint Pierre's life and

speculations, see M. Léonce de Lavergne's _Economistes français du

18ième siècle_ (Paris: 1870). Also Comte's _Lettres à M. Valat_, p.

73.

[263] _Conf._, ix. 270-274.

[264] _Conf._, ix. 289.

[265] _Ib._ ix. 286.

[266] D'Epinay, ii. 153.

[267] Madame d'Houdetot, (_b._ 1730--_d._ 1813) was the daughter of M.

de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage

with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748.

The circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view

of the vows common among the great people of the time, are given with

perhaps a shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay's

_Mém._, i 101.

[268] _Conf._, ix. 281.

[269] D'Epinay, ii. 246.

[270] D'Epinay, ii. 269.

[271] Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her

composition, ii. 136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account of

her, pp. 140, 141.

[272] Quoted by M. Girardin, _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853, p.

1080.

[273] _Conf._, ix. 304.

[274] _Ib._ ix. 305. Slightly modified version in _Corr._, i. 377.

[275] M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.

[276] Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.

[277] This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to

which we come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot

to Rousseau in May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she

distinctly says that she concealed his mad passion for her from Saint

Lambert, who first heard of it in common conversation.

[278] _Conf._, ix. 311.

[279] Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions,

see the phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in the _Mélanges_, pp.

347-360.

[280] _Conf._, ix. 337.

[281] _Corr._, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.

[282] To Madame d'Houdetot. _Corr._, i. 376-387. June 1757.

[283] Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757.

Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.

[284] These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume

(pp. 354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps

the one best worth turning to.

[285] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. _Conf._, x. 15.

[286] _Ib._ x. 22.

[287] _Ib._ x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.

[288] _Conf._, x. 24.

[289] To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. _Corr._, i. 362, 353. See also

_Conf._, ix. 307.

[290] One of the most unflinching in this kind is an _Essai sur la vie

et le caractère de J.J. Rousseau_, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the

laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the

Confessions, Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due to

verbal inspiration, and writes of everybody who offended his hero,

quite in the vein of Marat towards aristocrats.

[291] _Corr._, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182

[292] D'Epinay, ii. 173.

[293] _Conf._, ix. 325.

[294] _Ib._, ix. 334.

[295] _Mém._, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than

Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the

winter of 1756-1757.

[296] The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's _Mém. de

Diderot, _p. 61.

[297] _Conf._, ix. 245, 246.

[298] Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. _Conf._, x.

17.

[299] _Mém._, ii. 318.

[300] _Conf._, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (_Mém._, ii. 326), writing to

Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of

reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account

for this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (_Rev.

des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between

her letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent

to Grimm, and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never

perfectly master of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the

revolutionary schools, as might indeed have been expected in a writer

with his predilections for the seventeenth century, rashly hints

(_Causeries_, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The

publication from the autograph originals sets this at rest.

[301] For Shakespeare, see _Corr. Lit._, iv. 143, etc.

[302] D'Epinay, ii. 188.

[303] D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's _Mém. de Diderot_, p. 61.

[304] _Mém._ ii. 128.

[305] P. 258. See also p. 146.

[306] Pp. 282, 336, etc.

[307] _Corr._, i. 386. June 1757.

[308] _Conf._, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible

version, assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see

_Mém._, ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentary

reconciliation in his letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i.

418), repeating what he had said before (p. 417), that Grimm always

spoke of Mm in amicable terms, though complaining of Rousseau's

injustice.

[309] _Conf._, ix. 372.

[310] _Corr._, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.

[311] Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._ ii. 386. Nov. 3,

1757.

[312] D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.

[313] _Corr._, i. 425. Nov. 8. _Ib._ 426.

[314] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.

[315] _Ib._ 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St.

Pierre (_Oeuv._, xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave

the Hermitage was the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending

him letters by some conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might

equally well have been sent for as many sous.

[316] The sources of all this are in the following places. _Corr._, i.

416. Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. _Conf._, ix. 377. _Corr._,

i. 427. Nov. 23. _Conf._, ix. 381. Dec. 1. _Ib._, ix. 383. Dec. 17.

[317] Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's _Oeuv._, xix.

446. See also 449 and 210.