Rousseau's Dog (16 page)

T
HE CHOICE OF
Chiswick remains a mystery. Hume told Mme de Barbantane, “He would not stay in London above a fortnight. I settled him in a village about six miles from it; he is impatient to remove from thence, though the place and the house are very agreeable to him.”

The simplest explanation is that Chiswick was the next village upriver from Fulham and Rousseau could afford it. But Hume would have been familiar with the location because his former pupil, the mad Lord Annandale, had a property there. Chiswick also enjoyed a historic reputation as a refuge—principally from the plague. It was close enough to London to keep in touch while detached from the stews of the capital: its air clean, the atmosphere bucolic, the gardens shaded by tall trees.

For Rousseau, it was a staging post. He informed Du Peyrou that he still intended to go to the farmhouse in Wales, but would wait for Le Vasseur in Chiswick, where they would benefit from a few weeks of a serenity impossible in London because of the overpowering throng. He complimented the English on their manners. They knew how to show their esteem without fawning—quite unlike the populace of Neuchâtel.

C
HISWICK NESTLES SNUGLY
on an oxbow bend in the Thames. In 1766, it had a population of about one thousand and was surrounded by farms and market gardens. Two other small villages lay to the northwest, and the three constituted the local parish. Five miles from the capital, it could be reached by foot (the river path led through Chelsea and Fulham), by boat (about an hour and a half), or by post chaise, along the main road to the west—a route notorious for highwaymen.

Running parallel to the riverbank was the main street, Chiswick Mall; joining it at a right angle, Church Street was home to a row of small stores that precariously rubbed up against one another, like a set of dominoes on the verge of collapse. At the junction of the two roads was (and is) St. Nicholas's Church, dating from the eleventh century. The less well-off, the bargemen and domestic staff, occupied higgledy-piggledy cottages around the back of the church. But elsewhere in the village, several mansions and a number of other substantial dwellings,
many dating from the seventeenth century, bespoke affluence and substance. One of the preeminent painters of the century, William Hogarth, had a country retreat in Chiswick and was buried there in 1765; his wife, sister, and mother-in-law lived on in his redbrick house. (The garden still contains its original mulberry tree—bearing the scars of a World War II bomb.)

However, there was little grandeur about Rousseau's lodgings. Somehow he found rooms with, in Rousseau's phrase, an “honest grocer, well regarded by his peers,” James Pullein; his wife, Elizabeth; and their two children.

Pullein's will indicates he was either deeply devout or feared the consequences of his business dealings. He was certainly apprehensive about the salvation of his soul, which he hoped could be entrusted to his “dearest Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ.” As a grocer, he would have sold dry provisions, flour, coffee, tea, sugar. The family probably occupied premises near Church Street, among a cluster of stores; the archives suggest they lived over the business. The 1766 rate books point to this being no ordinary shop. Its rateable value (known as the Overseers Rate) was sixteen pounds—a figure more than twice that of the majority of houses in Chiswick.

The indications are that the Pulleins, who had only recently been living in a larger house, were in financial straits, one possible explanation for their taking on a lodger. Unusually, they had arranged to stagger one of the required taxes—the churchwarden rate—over four quarters, rather than settle it in one payment, as was the usual practice. Rates funded a variety of social services, such as the local workhouse for the destitute, and paid for the ongoing battle to exterminate vermin who were destroying crops and produce. At the time the prickly Genevan was in the village, Chiswick was also overrun by hedgehogs. Sparrows were a terrible nuisance, too. The problem was so bad that the parish authorities placed a bounty on the pests' heads: four pence for each hedgehog, a meager twopence for a dozen sparrow heads.

Rousseau seems to have fitted quickly into the Pullein family. He sat in the shop, teaching the daughter French. When Pullein's son went to Paris to learn the language (for his future career), Rousseau asked his publisher, Pierre Guy, to help him locate a cheap
pension
—or demi-pension “as the English never take supper.” The boy's mother, said Rousseau, had been very attentive and he wanted to be of service to her. He thought Elizabeth Pullein “a wife of merit.” Guy should do what he could without burdening his time or purse, and he, Rousseau, “would count it as done for me.”

However pleasing the Pullein family, the village itself was scarcely the haven of peace he sought. The shopping area near Church Street was the busiest and noisiest part. Within a three-minute walk there were at least four inns. There were two large breweries, from which arose a constant rumble of barrels being rolled and loaded onto carts. Next door was a slaughterhouse, where animals squealed their way to the butcher's knife.

Then there were the idlers and gawpers. Reports, perhaps apocryphal, had both locals and day-trippers from the metropolis coming to stare at the persecuted lion as he sat in the grocer's shop. At least for Pullein, it was said, this had a beneficial effect: the constant traffic brought an upturn in business.

Unlike in London, however, Rousseau could put the din behind him, going for long walks by the river and through the fields, and indulging his passion for botany. Apparently, he was taken botanizing by a professor at the request of George III's favorite, the Earl of Bute: the former prime minister was a keen botanist and laid the foundation for the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew, just across the river from Chiswick. According to Hume's biographer John Hill Burton, the professor was

In Chiswick, he was also away from Hume's fellow lodger in Lisle Street, Louis-François Tronchin. The young man (who was not unsympathetic to Rousseau) was well aware of his fellow Genevan's feelings: he told a friend that the Tronchin name was odious to Rousseau, and that Rousseau believed he (Louis-François) might have come to spy on his conduct, to persecute him and even to assassinate him. Tronchin must have informed his father, the physician Dr. Théodore Tronchin, who replied at the beginning of March that he was not surprised.

Rousseau had been Dr. Tronchin's patient and friend until July 1759. Their breach came when Tronchin was urging Rousseau to return to Geneva from his solitary life in France and asked Rousseau how it was “that the proclaimed friend of mankind is no more the friend of men.” But if distance from the young Tronchin promoted Rousseau's peace of mind, Chiswick brought still greater relief: for there at his side, at last, was his
gouvernante.
It had been four months since he had seen her in Isle Saint-Pierre, by far the longest period they had been apart in over two decades. He had missed her and entreated her to join him. She had reached her home, Paris, but, not unnaturally, was frightened of journeying across the Channel to Britain.

A solution presented itself. However, withheld from Rousseau—forever—were the exact details of her journey to England. And for good reason.

T
HE SOLUTION HAD
materialized in the shape of lusty, young James Boswell.

He was then at the end of his European tour and was passing through Paris some three weeks after Hume and Rousseau had left it. Visiting John Wilkes on Monday, January 27, he picked up a copy of the
St. James's Chronicle
and saw that his mother had died. That evening he sought solace in a brothel. A letter arrived from his father the next day, confirming the bad news and asking his son to come home. Boswell was “quite stupefied.” On Wednesday, having discovered that Le Vasseur was in town, he went in search of her at the Hôtel de Luxembourg in the rue Saint-Marc, where she was staying with the first lady-in-waiting to the Duchesse de Luxembourg. Le Vasseur shared her fears about her trip to London; “If only we could travel together,” she said. Boswell replied that was exactly what he had come to propose. She and Rousseau had been in regular contact: she showed Boswell a couple of letters from him. Apparently she could read well enough to follow his instructions on how to wash his new shirts, and to heed a warning about the future: “Resign yourself to suffering a great deal.” “Quackery this,” Boswell commented.

In a depressed state of mind, preoccupied with thoughts of his mother, Boswell set out with his companion on Friday, January 31.

There is no direct record of what followed en route to London. Boswell's journal entries for the first eleven days of February 1766 vanished. A slip of paper took their place with the laconic comment “Reprehensible Passage,” written by one of Boswell's literary executors. They were reconstructed by Colonel Ralph Isham, who had conserved the Scotsman's papers and must have read the appropriate passages: according
to Frank Brady and Frederick Pottle, editors of Boswell's papers, the story is “gleaned from his notes.”

He had not planned a seduction, but on their second night on the road they slept together.

His initial attempt was “a fiasco,” and it was only after Le Vasseur comforted him that he regained some strength. He expected her plaudits—was he not youthful and ardent compared with Rousseau? Nevertheless, the next morning, he received a damning verdict on his performance: “I allow that you are a hardy and vigorous lover, but you have no art.” Seeing his crestfallen face, she offered to give him lessons. That night he had to fortify himself with a bottle of red wine. Her advice was to be ardent but gentle, and not to hurry. Also, he should make better use of his hands. He wrote that she rode him “agitated, like a bad rider galloping downhill.” When he grew fed up with the technical instruction, he tried to turn the conversation back to Rousseau—to hear some of his
dicta philosophi
—but this only bored her. It was a mistake, he reflected, to get entangled with an old man's mistress.

Rousseau, meanwhile, was worried. On February 6, he wrote to Mme de Boufflers—surely they should have arrived in England by now?

Le Vasseur and Boswell sailed into Dover on Tuesday, February 11, and went straight to bed. His final entry of the voyage summed up the outcome, and perhaps restored his pride: “Wednesday, 12 February. Yesterday morning had gone to bed early, and had done it once: thirteen in all. Was really affectionate to her.” As they were together for ten days, that is an impressive but not exceptional statistic.

They ate their first meal of the day—beefsteaks—late in the afternoon in Rochester. The night of February 12, Le Vasseur probably stayed at Hume's. On February 13, Boswell “went to Mlle Le Vasseur, with whom was David Hume,” breakfasted, then escorted her to Chiswick. On that journey Boswell gave his word that he would keep their affair a secret, until either Rousseau or Le Vasseur had passed away.

Boswell had not set eyes on Rousseau for a year and a half, and though they enthusiastically embraced, the younger man was disappointed and shocked by how aged and weak the exile looked. They had a perfunctory discussion: Rousseau talked of moving to Wales, and Boswell inquired whether Scotland had any claim over him, to which Rousseau replied, “I shall act like the kings; I shall put my body in one place, and my heart in another.”

Leaving Le Vasseur in Chiswick, Boswell kept his widowed father waiting a little longer and scurried straight to the Mitre Tavern off Fleet Street to renew his ties with Dr. Johnson. Johnson promptly rebuked him for spending time with Wilkes and Rousseau. Did Johnson really see Rousseau as a bad man? asked Boswell. “Sir,” the doctor rejoined, “Rousseau is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations.”

A month later Lord Marischal, having heard about his reunion with Le Vasseur, wrote to Rousseau: “I rejoice with you on the arrival of Mlle Le Vasseur, and with Mr. Boswell on the pleasure he has received in being able to do you a service; he is a truly honourable man, a perfect gentleman.”

N
OT LONG AFTER
Rousseau and Le Vasseur were reunited, Rousseau went up to London for a sitting with Allan Ramsay in the painter's studio at 67 Harley Street. The next year, Ramsay would become the principal portrait painter to George III and cease painting private sitters. He was a firm friend of David Hume's: the year they formed their Edinburgh debating club, the Select Society of Edinburgh, 1754, was also the year Ramsay first painted Hume, portraying him in a scholar's cap and patterned white waistcoat.

Ramsay's 1766 depictions of Rousseau and Hume are considered
among his finest accomplishments. He had never before encountered Rousseau, but was no fan of his works. He later wrote to Diderot, describing in derogatory terms Rousseau's championing of nature. “Those who indulge in intellectual pursuits find little charm in the bare necessities of life. Reduced to bare necessity, one must bid farewell to poetry, painting and all the agreeable branches of philosophy, and embrace instead Rousseau's Nature—Nature on all fours.”