Winfried Sebald - A Place in the Country

Madelon and Julie de la Tour and other young ladies take on the aspect of an innocent bricolage in comparison with the self-destructive business of writing to which he usually submitted himself. A faint aura of unconscious beauty still hovers over these flower collections, in which lichens, sprigs of veronica, lilies of the valley, and autumn crocuses have survived, pressed and a little faded, from the eighteenth century. They can still be admired today in the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The herbarium Rousseau compiled for himself, meanwhile — eleven quarto volumes — was, up to the Second World War, preserved in the Botanical Museum in Berlin, until, like so much and so many in that city, it went up in flames one night during one of the nocturnal bombing raids.

Rousseau is only able to experience the true contrast to the employment which even botanizing represents when, on fine days, he rows far out on the calm waters of the lake. “There, stretching out full length in the boat,” we read in the chapter on the island, “and turning my eyes skyward, I let myself float and drift wherever the water took me, often for several hours on end.” The clarity of the sky arching over him out there on the lake is reminiscent of the description of the mountains of the Valais at the beginning of La Nouvelle Héloïse as a landscape freed from the veils of lower, denser atmosphere, which has something of a magical, transcendental quality about it and in which one forgets everything, even oneself, and no longer knows where one is. “The moment of utmost clarity of the landscape,” writes Jean Starobinski, who has studied the theme of transparency in Rousseau, “is at one and the same time the moment at which individual existence dissolves at its limits and is dreamily transformed into thin air.” To become totally transparent was, according to Starobinski, the greatest ambition of the inventor of modern autobiography. The symbol of this ambition is the crystal, for it is impossible to tell, Starobinski states, whether it is “a body in its purest state or, by contrast, a petrified soul.” Starobinski points out in this context, poised between alchemy and metaphysics, that Rousseau, in his Institutions chimiques , devotes a great deal of attention to the process of vitrification, quoting a passage in which Rousseau discusses the author of a volume published in 1669 entitled Physica subterranea , one Johann Joachim Becher, who derives his vitreous earth not merely from the realm of minerals but also from the ashes of plants and animals. “He assures us,” Rousseau writes of Becher, “that they contain an easily fusible, vitrifiable earth from which it is possible to make vases superior to the finest porcelain. Using procedures that he keeps shrouded in much mystery, he has carried out experiments that have convinced him that man, like all animals, is glass and can return to glass. This leads him to the most entertaining reflections on the trouble the ancients took to burn or embalm the dead, and on ways in which one might preserve the ashes of one’s ancestors by means of a few hours’ work, replacing hideous and disgusting cadavers with clean, shining vases of beautiful, transparent glass, tinted not with the characteristic green of glass made from plants but with a milky white color heightened by a slight tinge of narcissus.” This conjecture about the metamorphosis of the body into a pure substance, as it were freed from the ephemerality of existence — which Rousseau might well have seen as a metaphor for true artistic production — is, as Starobinski writes, in the final phase of his thought transformed into its “negative counterpart: pulverization, which kills the light and reduces human society to a dark, indistinguishable and impenetrable mass. No exchange is possible between opposites; Jean-Jacques’ transparency is solidified, the dark night outside him congealed. The veil, too, has changed: no longer thin and fluttering, it has descended to enclose the world it once concealed in a web of darkness.”

A dozen years filled with fear and panic await Rousseau after his departure from the Île Saint-Pierre on the twenty-fifth of October. He spends a few days in Bienne, which is under the jurisdiction of the Prince Bishop of Basel and where some of the citizens hope to be able to secure him the right to remain, at least for the winter. He spends the first night in the Croix Blanche and then finds quarters with Masel, a wigmaker of ill repute, in a room overlooking a stinking tanning pit. Nor are the other signs any more auspicious. Influenced by Berne, which in reality calls the tune in Bienne, several members of the Magistrat [municipal council] declare themselves opposed to offering asylum to the stateless refugee. On the twenty-ninth, therefore, Rousseau moves on again. From Basel he writes to Thérèse La Vasseur, the woman who has looked after him for twenty years and the mother of his five long-lost children, saying he is feverish, with a sore throat and sick at heart. His sole consolation is his dog Sultan, who has run for thirty miles ahead of the carriage like a courier and who now, Rousseau continues, “is lying asleep on my coat under the table as I write.” On the thirty-first of October, Rousseau leaves Basel, and Switzerland—“cette terre homicide,” as he says on the last page of his autobiography — for good. He is now resolved to take up the offer of asylum in England. The passport issued to him allows him to travel through France, breaking the journey at Strasbourg and Paris, where the world and his wife come to marvel at him and such Rousseau hysteria prevails that David Hume, who has made use of his ambassadorial influence to intercede in England on Rousseau’s behalf, writes to Hugh Blair that he would venture to raise by subscription the sum of £50,000 (an enormous sum in those days) in the French capital in under two weeks, if only Rousseau would allow it. He is such an object of fascination in society (writes Hume) that his housekeeper, La Vasseur, who after all is merely an uneducated woman, is more talked about than the Princess of Monaco or the Countess Egmont. “His very dog, who is no better than a coly,” Hume adds, “has a name and reputation in the world.” At the beginning of January 1766, Rousseau travels to England. There, alone in a foreign country, he is increasingly at the mercy of the latent paranoia to which he has always been prone and which, in exile, has become acute. His mood oscillates between despondency and exhilaration. A certain J. Craddock relates in his Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs , published in London in 1828, that Rousseau, despite knowing scarcely any English, on a visit to a theatrical production to which he was invited by Garrick was so overcome with weeping at the tragedy performed that evening, and so transported with laughter at the comedy which followed, that he was quite beside himself, “and that Mrs. Garrick had to hold the skirt of his caftan to prevent his falling out of the box.” Hume had the opportunity to observe these mood swings for himself when Rousseau came to confide in him about his suspicions and walked darkly up and down in his room for an hour without saying a word, only then suddenly to sit upon his lap, cover his face with kisses and assure him, with tears in his eyes, of his eternal friendship and gratitude. After this it was not long until he came to see Hume, too, as one of the most insidious among the conspirators plotting to deprive him of both his honor and his livelihood. The silent exchange of glances, which in La Nouvelle Héloïse indicate the harmony of souls, he now perceives as a threat. Constantly impelled by his fear in a hostile environment to investigate the slightest nuance, any minute irregularity he discovers in the behavior of a given interlocutor is taken as evidence that the latter is involved in the conspiracy being plotted against him. “For Jean-Jacques,” Jean Starobinski writes, “to live amid persecution is to feel caught in a web of interlocking signs.” Every now and then the states of anxiety abate a little. In Wootton in Derbyshire, where he found refuge in a country house belonging to Richard Davenport, a noble elderly gentleman whose acquaintance he had made at a social gathering in London, he enjoyed a brief period of respite, taking up his botanical studies again and writing some of the most lyrical pages of his Confessions . However — not least because Davenport himself was not present in the house to intervene in the misunderstandings which flared up here too — once again everything soon turned sour. Thérèse fell out with the servants, who did not take kindly to being ordered about by this upstart Frenchwoman, and things came to a head in the spring when Davenport’s housekeeper set down before the two guests a soup strewn with cinders and ash. Rousseau grows more and more convinced that his every action, and every change in his circumstances, through no fault of his own gives rise to consequences and chains of events beyond his control, making him a prisoner of his enemies conspiring everywhere against him. After leaving Wootton at the beginning of May 1767 in order to return to France, he writes from Spalding in Lincolnshire — a godforsaken place set among endless fields of cabbage and beet — to Lord Chancellor Camden, asking him to place an escort at his disposal so that he may be sure of reaching Dover safely and without undue delay. For three years after his return to France, Rousseau lives with Thérèse — often under an assumed name — in remote country seats of the nobility such as Château Trye in Normandy, or in small towns like Bourgoin or Monquin far away in the South, always with the shadow of outlawry hanging over him. When, in 1770, on condition of not publishing anything on political or religious questions, he receives permission to reside in the capital, attempting to eke out a living there by copying out sheet music, the morbid universe surrounding him can no longer be dispelled. “The children’s grimaces,” Starobinski writes, “the price of peas in Les Halles, the small shops in the rue Plâtrière — all appeared to be evidence of the same conspiracy.” This notwithstanding, Rousseau does still succeed in accomplishing a considerable amount. He finishes the Confessions and reads from them in various salons in sessions lasting up to seventeen (!) hours, to some extent anticipating Franz Kafka’s desire to be allowed to read aloud, to an audience condemned to listen, the whole of Stendhal’s Éducation sentimentale at one sitting. There follow a few more treatises, on botany and on the government of Poland, as well as the so-called Dialogues , in which Rousseau appears as the judge of Jean-Jacques. In his last two years while out walking he makes notes, on playing cards, for the