Winfried Sebald - A Place in the Country

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

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