Rousseau's Dog (21 page)

Hume was pleased with his sensitive reaction to this outpouring of feeling, aware of a reputation for being cold and detached. “I hope you have not so bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion: I assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more affecting.”

Hume reprised the episode to Mme de Boufflers, desiring her to restrict the news of this altercation to the ladies in her circle, because “I scarce know a male who would not think it childish.” But he asked her to transmit it on to Mme de Luxembourg, Mme de Barbantane, “and such of her female friends as you think worthy of it. … Ask Mme de L'Espinasse whether she can venture to tell it to d'Alembert.” Short of his placing an advertisement in the
Brussels Gazette,
it is hard to think how he might have publicized the encounter more widely.

Hume acknowledged to Mme de Boufflers that he had not replied to a letter from Mlle de L'Espinasse in February. He did not add that he had failed to pass on to Rousseau her suggestion (in very complimentary terms) that he should write the late dauphin's eulogy, as he would bring to it just the right sensibility. The dauphin, shortly before his death, had praised Rousseau and regretted his persecution, she said. And a tribute from Rousseau “would help to ease [his] return to France and to his
friends.” It is unlikely that Rousseau would have responded positively to such an idea from someone so close to d'Alembert. But Hume's keeping to himself such superficially heartwarming news is distinctly odd.

Hume remained doubtful about Rousseau's sticking it out in Derbyshire, writing to Jean-Charles Trudaine de Montigny, “If it be possible for a man to live without occupation, without books, without society, and without sleep, he will not quit this wild and solitary place, where all the circumstances which he ever required seem to concur for the purpose of rendering him happy. But I dread the weakness and inquietude natural to every man, and, above all, to a man of his character. I should not be surprised that he had soon quitted this retreat.”

They had known each other for only four months and would not meet again.

13

O
N MARCH
22, the chaise bearing Rousseau, Le Vasseur, and Sultan trundled through a wooded valley and up the long, steep, muddy drive that led to Wootton Hall and the seclusion for which the exile yearned. Wootton Hall was set on a lonely eminence—the village of Wootton a little above it, the village of Ellaston a little below—in a
wild, remote part of Staffordshire, just across the border from Derbyshire and nestling in the Weaver hills. Its isolation accounts for the local saying “Wootton-under-Weaver, where God came neever.” (The Hall was demolished in 1931; in the past few years a new mansion, in classical style, has been constructed on the site.)

Rousseau's impressions of Wootton Hall were recorded in a letter to Mme de Luze in Neuchâtel.

It is intriguing that Rousseau should have depicted Wootton Hall as “not very large” and, later, as “small but very habitable and well designed.” Either he was being disingenuous and eager to promote his image as a simple hermit, or else he had been spoiled by the ostentatious magnificence of the French aristocracy. In fact, Wootton Hall was a substantial home, its main castellated block three stories high.

One of its features was a curving, expansive staircase with an elaborate oak balustrade leading to a projecting wing with a view on three sides. There, Rousseau claimed for himself “only” two rooms, just above his host's apartments, where there was a drawing room and “a kind of vestibule or antechamber which is very strange, lighted by a large glass lantern in the middle of the roof.” Above were the servants' quarters.

Although the calendar indicated spring, a bitterly cold spell was closing in. It snowed within a day of the exiles' arrival and the estate was entirely cut off from the outside world. After the bright lights of London
and even the comparative bustle of rural Chiswick, what would have struck Rousseau was the utter stillness of the area—what he professed to want—and at night the darkness, which had always made him jumpy and afraid.

Nonetheless, he had few regrets about his decision. The countryside was beautiful but sad, he wrote. Nature here was “sluggish and lazy.” He missed the sound of nightingales. The trees, to his chagrin, had no leaves. He complained that the vegetables lacked flavor and the game had none at all. Ultimately, though, Wootton afforded “a commodious, agreeable, and solitary habitation, where the master provides everything, and nothing is wanting: I am quiet and independent.” There was no one to disturb him.

He seemed genuinely content—even cheery. He turned down his landlord's offer of more reading material, though he requested from Du Peyrou that his botany books be forwarded, and his music books, too, for in Wootton he had use of a spinet.

Contacting Hume was one of his first acts. “As you can see from the date of the letter,” I have arrived, Rousseau informed his
cher patron.
The letter was almost all gratitude. “If I live in this agreeable asylum as happy as I hope to do,” he told Hume, “one of the greatest pleasures of my life will be, to reflect that I owe them to you. To make another happy is to deserve to be happy one's self. May you, therefore, find in yourself the reward of all you have done for me!” He went on to say that for the reasons they had discussed—presumably to do with cost—he wished not to receive anything by post. When Hume had to write to him, could he send it via Davenport?

But what he saw as the slight of the pretended retour chaise was still gnawing at him, and, interestingly, he blamed Hume more than Davenport, penning a stiff reprimand to his patron. “The affair of the carriage is not yet adjusted, because I know I was imposed on; it is a trifling fault, however, which may be only the effect of an obliging vanity, unless it should happen to be repeated. If you had a hand in it, I would
advise you to give up, once for all, these little stratagems, which cannot have a good motive, when changed into snares for simplicity.”

He closed with an oracular salutation. “
Je vous embrasse, mon cher Patron, avec le même Coeur que j'espère et désire trouver en vous.
” (I embrace you, my dear patron, with the same love I hope and desire to find in you.) It is unlikely that Hume stopped to consider the phrasing.

Rousseau also immediately wrote to his new landlord, Davenport, gently reproving him, and pointing out that it could not have been a return chaise if the driver was going back to London with his mail. (Davenport gave the game away by instructing the driver to wait.)

Another warm note to Hume followed a week later. “It is freezing here since I arrived; it has snowed every day; the wind cuts one's face; yet in spite of these things I would rather live in the hole of one of the rabbits in this warren than in the finest apartment of London. Good-day, my dear patron, I embrace you and love you with all my heart.” In a P.S. he mentioned that one of Mr. Fitzherbert's servants had accompanied them on the Derby-to-Ashbourne leg after their chaise had an accident—the driver was drunk.

H
OWEVER,
R
OUSSEAU HAD
much preying on his mind beyond the affront of the retour chaise. He had begun slowly to work out the details of a plot against him. In his imagination, a vast conspiracy was taking shape in which Hume loomed up as the central figure.

A central piece of evidence was that spoof letter in the name of the king of Prussia, mentioned earlier. Rousseau seems to have read it early in April when it appeared in the London press, after having made the rounds in Paris in the new year.

That the satire was the invention of that mad jester, that
fou moqueur,
Horace Walpole, was common knowledge in the Republic of Letters. The spoof was conceived and composed by him, and then polished by his French acquaintances, between December 12 and 27, 1765, and was in circulation probably from December 27, certainly from January 1, 1766. Walpole became the talk of Paris, and described the effect in a cluster of self-congratulatory letters to England, such as this to Conway, on January 12, 1766.

He sent copies of the letter to other regular correspondents. To one (John Chute, who worked with him on Strawberry Hill), he recounted why he felt moved to upbraid Rousseau—whom he regarded as a charlatan and hypocrite.