William Boyd - The New Confessions

The first thirty-eight years of Rousseau’s life were passed in almost total obscurity. He occupied a succession of menial jobs and probably would have been content to remain with the encyclopédistes’ claque (who contrived to find the amiable civilization of monarchical France too despotic for their taste) had he not emerged as a figure of fame and renown with his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences . In this he asserted — with improbable eloquence obscuring the unlikely paradox — that man is happier in a savage natural state than in an advanced civilized one. He became the toast of Paris and his Discourse proved to be the passport he sought to high society. [He did not seek this.]

In the meantime Thérèse le Vasseur had borne him five children, all of whom, and with no qualms, Rousseau had abandoned in succession at the door of the foundling hospital in Paris.

Fame and its trappings, however, consorted uneasily with the man who had enjoined the “noble savage” as an exemplary model for mankind. Rousseau returned to Geneva in 1754, promptly renounced his Catholicism and became a Calvinist and a citizen once more. His retreat did not last long. Society and its rich patrons proved to be too strong an allure and Rousseau accepted the offer of Mme. d’Épinay to occupy the Hermitage, a pleasant cottage on her estate in the forest of Montmorency. The peace and quiet of the countryside delighted him, but it was not too last. Mme. d’Épinay desired his company; Diderot and Grimm besought him to return to the salons of Paris; and then Rousseau fell in love with Mme. d’Épinay’s sister, the Comtesse d’Houdetot, who was mistress of the noble soldier-poet Saint-Lambert. This led first to complications, then to tension and recrimination, concluding in bitter acrimony among the participants.

With surprising ease Rousseau found another patron, the Maréchal de Luxembourg. Upon him now fell the honour of providing the philosopher and his doxy with a home [this is academic bitchery at its worst]. But new heights of celebrity awaited Rousseau. Within a period of eighteen months (1761–62) three large works were published: The New Héloïse, Émile and The Social Contract They presented revolutionary views on all the topics most vital to humanity and society: government, education, religion, sexual morality, family life, the source of our deep emotions and love.

This was Rousseau’s annus mirabilis but, as so often with the man, it brought only disaster in its train. Unorthodox views of religion expounded in Emile (a treatise of education in the form of a novel) offended the authorities. The book was condemned and a warrant was issued for its author’s arrest. Rousseau, however, was given every opportunity to escape and he proceeded quickly to Switzerland. But he was no longer welcome there and so moved to Neuchâtel, then Prussian territory. He lived quietly there in rural seclusion, began writing his Confessions and received occasional visitors, among whom was the young Scotsman James Boswell, later biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson (q.v.).

Conscious of the fragile nature of his state of exile in Neuchâtel, Rousseau accepted the generous invitation of David Hume (q.v.), the philosopher, to come and live in England. He settled at Wootton Hall near Ashbourne. By this time the persecution complex from which he had always suffered took greater hold on him and degenerated to a chronic form of delusional insanity. He became convinced that Hume — his benefactor — was in fact plotting against him, and grew jealous of his fame. Rousseau accused him of intercepting his mail and a violent quarrel ensued, with Rousseau and Mlle, le Vasseur returning to the Continent. Then followed a nomadic period of brief sojourns in provincial France before Rousseau settled finally in Paris, tolerated and unmolested by an indulgent and forgiving government. He completed his Confessions (which was published posthumously) and composed the famous Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques and the serene Reveries of a Solitary Walker .

In Rousseau’s Confessions the bizarre compulsion to tell unsparingly the whole and entire truth about oneself was more original than edifying, but the more contemplative Reveries gave rise to a sense of pity for a man who Was, it must be admitted, his own worst enemy. He was a man in whom astonishing gifts were marred and undermined by serious defects of character and judgment. Selfishness and paranoia, vanity and reckless opportunism, base ingratitude, passion and prejudice ruled this simple, intermittently sagacious thinker. It is indeed true that Rousseau and his works irrevocably altered European thought and sensibility, but it must be adjoined that it was not always for the better. He died on July 2, 1778, at Ermenonville, of an apoplectic fit.

Apoplexy is the only adequate response to that final paragraph, which has to be the most contemptible and shameful epitaph ever bestowed on one of the great geniuses of modern history. I reproduce it merely as a small sample of what Jean Jacques had — and has had — to endure from the small-minded throughout his tormented life and beyond. I will not dignify Dr. Milby-Low’s evil innuendos, many inaccuracies and omissions by further comment. The rough shape of Jean Jacques’s difficult, unique life is there — we will illumine it further, later. In the meantime only two observations need to be made.

1. Be sure of this: nothing Milby-Low recounts here is missing from Rousseau’s Confessions , as you might be forgiven for thinking from the note of smug revelation that she sometimes employs. Rousseau himself was and is the source of all slander directed against him by pedants and prudes. It is all down in fearless candor in that magnificent book and the companion volumes— Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques and the Rêveries . No misdemeanor escapes him, from the great to the inconsequential: from abandoning his children to pissing secretly in a cantankerous neighbor’s simmering soup pot when she wasn’t looking. Rousseau is judged by Jean Jacques, not the Milby-Lows of this world.

2. Is it not curious that a life dogged with misfortune, riven with acrimony, disappointment and bitterness, is somehow perceived by the rest of mankind to be the unhappy sufferer’s own doing? True, there are people who are “their own worst enemy,” who pursue a helter-skelter ride to self-destruction. But at the same time, why can’t it be admitted that a man or woman can be cursed with filthy luck, can be denied opportunities available to others, can be surrounded by false friends and cozening flatterers? Why not? There is nothing in the scheme of things to say that this will never be the case — that it is always a result of one’s own misdirected Will. There is no guarantee of good fortune, no assurance that your allies will always be staunch, that unfairness and indifference will not always prevail. So why in these cases (Jean Jacques’s case) does the world howl paranoic, lunatic, misanthrope, ingrate, egomaniac?

I will tell you why. Because it makes people feel better, more secure. They can live, grudgingly, with a charmed life — there’s hope for us all, then — but a cursed life makes everyone uneasy. If they can lay all the blame on the victim, it makes Fate seem to be somehow under control — we play as big a part in our own downfall. We are somehow agents, responsible. Chance, the random and haphazard, the contingent, do not really dictate the way the world turns.

We began filming The Confessions: Part I in July 1927, a month later than we planned. Part I was to cover Rousseau’s life from his birth in 1712 up to 1740, when reluctantly and with heavy heart he decides to leave his beloved Maman , his lover and benefactress, with his rival, the detestable Witzenreid, and to seek his fortune elsewhere. Part II was to deal with his rise to fame and terminate with the scandal of Émile and flight to Switzerland. Part III —I had barely thought this out, I admit — was to deal with his last years: cold exile in England, the bitter quarrel with Hume, the return to Paris and the serene botanizing of his last years. Thus, broadly, was the great scheme I had conceived. Part I was ready to film, most of Part II was drafted and Part III , I felt sure, would almost write itself when we reached that stage three years hence. I felt intoxicated, full of vigor and enthusiasm, on the brink of a great adventure.