Rousseau's Dog (34 page)

Rousseau was seriously contemplating Davenport's invitation to return to Wootton (a plan he ditched for fear that Walpole was now plotting against him). Meanwhile, he continued to wander and to botanize. In 1769, one walk “with three gentlemen” went disastrously wrong when the weather suddenly turned for the worse. Then: “One of our gentlemen was bitten by a dog [and] Sultan was half massacred by another dog: he disappeared and I thought him dead of his wounds or
eaten by the wolf, and I was absolutely confounded on my return here to find him tranquil and perfectly healed.”

In 1770, Rousseau moved back to Paris and resumed the vocation that had sustained him throughout his life, copying music. He was asked by a group of dissident Polish aristocrats, and consented, to write the
Considerations on the Government of Poland
(published posthumously in 1782). Brooke Boothby was among those to visit him in Paris, “When one day I vainly endeavoured to argued [sic] with him on his insane notions [of being constantly persecuted], I imprudently asked him if I was included amongst his oppressors. His eyes darting fire,—'Do not force me [to reply],' he said.” Courageously, Brooke Boothby raised the issue of the pension from George III. It had been authorized, but Rousseau had still not given instructions as to how it should be paid; considerable arrears had built up. Rousseau's response was that as he had spoken of his treatment in England in “an unfavourable manner,” the first thing he required was a public apology. (It is not obvious who was supposed to deliver it.) Nevertheless, at home he is said to have displayed a portrait of George III.

For a period, Rousseau's educational theories were all the rage, not only in France and England, but in Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland, too. Scores of pedagogical treatises were produced, almost all of them bearing his imprint. Parents who experimented by raising their children on Rousseauian principles experienced mixed results, some reporting that they produced a disconcerting wildness in their guinea pigs. It is possible that Davenport intentionally brought up his orphaned grandson Davies along Rousseauian lines. The boy turned out well, but fretted that he had received insufficient formal education, and did not like to hear the name of Rousseau mentioned.

In Paris during 1770–71, Rousseau gave readings—sometimes for up to seventeen hours—from the
Confessions.
His erstwhile friend Mme d'épinay, feeling defamed by his portrayal of her as a schemer and gossip, eventually persuaded the police to prohibit them. His readings
elicited polarized reactions. Some listeners wept and kissed Rousseau's hand during passages of high emotional drama. Others were revolted. Mme de Boufflers totally repudiated him after reading the book on publication. The memoirs were “like those of a farmyard worker or even lower, disagreeable, as well as tedious, thoroughly insane and spiteful in the most disgusting manner. I cannot get over it that I used to make a cult … of this filthy animal.”

Also posthumously published was the insanely brilliant
Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques,
which had gestated over several years. In these split-personality dialogues between Rousseau and Jean-Jacques, Rousseau is judge, jury, and defendant as the author's deeds and personality are forensically examined and extracts from his writings used as evidence against him. Rousseau convicts himself on several counts, including being weak willed and following his whims, rather than being influenced by his duty. (Here he also has second thoughts on Ramsay's portrait of him, accusing Hume of having contrived the painting out of sheer malice and ensuring that in every respect—posture, clothes, Ramsay's palette—the sitter emerged as dark and monstrous with, in Rousseau's characterization, “the face of a frightful cyclops.”)

When the work was completed in 1776, Rousseau was desperate to forestall any attempt by his foes to suppress it. On February 24, he tried to place the manuscript on the high altar of Notre Dame, as though seeking sanctuary for it. The plan went awry: the gate dividing the choir from the nave was shut. According to an early biographer, Henry Grey Graham, Rousseau then “wildly rushed from the church feeling God had joined with man in the conspiracy against him and wandered till darkness and fatigue drove him home.”

However, this disturbed state was not to endure. In his last years, Rousseau again achieved a degree of equanimity.
Reveries of a Solitary Walker,
composed between 1776 and 1778, reveal a man who seems, finally, at ease with himself, no longer raging at an unjust world or the corrupt and vain
philosophes.
His portrayals of nature, seen afresh as
transcendental and sublime, have had a profound impact on novelists and poets. The thinker who had read the truth of his and Hume's character from his heart now conceded in the
Reveries
that “the real and basic motives of most of my actions are not as clear to me as I had long supposed.”

England was not forgotten. Despite the rawness of his experiences there, Rousseau continued to remain in touch with his friends from Wootton. In 1769, he had sent the Duchess of Portland seeds and plants. And three years later, on April 17, 1772, he wrote to her again, this time to thank her for news of Miss Dewes's forthcoming marriage. “I rejoice therein with all my heart, and I rejoice both for her who is so well suited to make a good man happy and to be happy herself and for her worthy uncle whom the happy outcome of this marriage will bless with joy in his latter days.”

I
N
M
AY
1778, Rousseau and Thérèse, his wife, retired to a cottage on an aristocratic estate in Ermenonville, north of the capital (belonging to the last in his long line of patrician benefactors, the Marquis de Girardin). There Rousseau died on July 2. Although the surgeons determined the cause had been apoplexy, rumors abounded that he had taken his own life. This seems unlikely: there is no record of Rousseau's ever having contemplated suicide, even when the restless dog in his shadow growled most menacingly.

He was buried on an islet in a lake in Ermenonville. But five years after the Revolution, the French National Assembly determined that his remains should lie in a place of honor in Paris. On October 9, 1794, to the strains of his own music, Rousseau's body was disinterred and began the journey to the city on which he had turned his back in life. Crowds paid tribute at every village. A great torchlit procession greeted him in the capital. There, on the morning of October 11, the coffin was placed in the Panthéon in the heart of revolutionary Paris and, in a curious
irony, positioned next to the body of his archenemy, Voltaire. Thérèse, who outlived Rousseau by twenty-three years, was on hand to witness her husband's nationalization: to the revolutionaries, her husband had come to embody the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

A
S FOR
le bon David,
until illness consumed him, his final years were comfortable, uneventful, and, unlike Rousseau's, almost totally unproductive.

On his fifty-seventh birthday, April 26, 1768, he wrote to Mme de Boufflers to inform her that Conway was leaving the secretary of state's office, and so, therefore, was he. Subsequent letters to France explained his decision not to return to Paris: the king, who had granted him a pension, was expecting him to continue with his
History.
But to
l'Idole du Temple
he gave another reason. He had a “strong desire of enjoying” her society, but “the truth is, I have, and ever had a prodigious reluctance to change my place of abode.” There had been a report in the newspapers that he would be going over to France “in his former station.” The story, he said, had no basis in fact.

The Rousseau episode, which Hume still believed had threatened to ruin his name, ate away at him, and he kept a vigilant eye on news of his adversary. Having discovered that Rousseau had taken flight from Conti's château, he was unable to resist another attack. Rousseau, he wrote to Mme de Boufflers, “is surely the most singular and most incomprehensible, and at the same time the most unhappy man that ever was born.” She told Hume untruthfully, perhaps to spare him embarrassment, that she had had no dealings with Rousseau since their row.

By the summer of 1769, Hume was back in Edinburgh for what was, effectively, the start of his retirement. It was a period of quiet contentment: he had his health, a revenue of £1,000 a year, “and though somewhat stricken in years … the prospect of enjoying long my ease and of seeing my reputation increase.” He entertained regularly and lavishly,
delighting in his (as he saw them) superb cooking skills. He claimed to Sir Gilbert Elliot that his sheep-head broth was so delicious that one of his guests spoke about it “for eight days after.”

He described himself as having “done with all ambition,” but he still wanted to polish his
History,
regarded then as the real jewel of all his works. Much of his spare time was devoted to revising it. In 1770, new editions came out. In his own words to Elliot, the thrust of the changes had been to “soften or expunge many villainous, seditious Whig strokes.” The early editions had been “too full of … foolish English prejudices.” Meanwhile, there was the constant hospitality: Benjamin Franklin paid a visit in 1771.

In 1772, Hume moved to a new, small house (“a large house for an author”), whose construction he had supervised. Oddly, on display in his parlor were Allan Ramsay's portraits of both himself and Rousseau. Hume had “totally and finally retired from the world,” he insisted to Mme de Boufflers, and “with a resolution never more to appear on the scene in any shape. This purpose arose, not from discontent, but from satiety. I have now no object but to
sit down and think, and die in peace.
”

Dying in peace would require tremendous fortitude. In the spring of 1775, he was affected by a bowel disorder. He could not know it, but he had cancer of the intestines. On February 8, 1776, he confessed to Adam Smith that he had lost five stone. He had aches and diarrhea. Smith's classic
Wealth of Nations
appeared in March, and Hume wrote to congratulate him. The weight of expectation for Smith's book had made Hume nervous, but after reading it, he was “much relieved.” Still, he remained skeptical of its winning a wide readership.

The cancer was coursing through his body. By the middle of 1776, he was so thin that he needed a cushion to sit. He wrote his short autobiography, My
Own Life,
in April 1776 and appointed Smith his literary executor with instructions to publish
Dialogues on Natural Religion,
which he had been reluctant to expose to the public for fear of disturbance
to his quiet life. “I consider an observation of [the seventeenth-century author, the Duc de la] Rochefoucauld, that a wind, though it extinguishes a candle, blows up a fire.” He told Smith that if he lived a few years longer, “I shall publish them myself.” After Smith balked at assuming responsibility for the explosive text, Hume added a codicil leaving his manuscripts and instructions to publish with Strahan.

He had no doubt that death was near. His physician updated Smith on the historian's health: “which is so bad that I am quite melancholy upon it, and as I hear that you intend a visit to this country soon, I wish, if possible, to hasten your coming that he may have the comfort of your company so much the sooner. He has been declining several years, and this in a slow and gradual manner, until about twelve month ago, since when the progress of his disorder has been more rapid.”

On July 4, 1776, the thirteen American colonies made their unanimous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia; it was also the day of Hume's last dinner party. Three days later Boswell, who was contemplating writing Hume's biography, came to see him. The formerly
gros David
was “lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance.” But what disturbed Boswell more was Hume's stubborn refusal, even in his final days, to take solace in God and concede the possibility of an afterlife. Worse still, Hume was disdainful of believers, remarking that “when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal.” Boswell did not think he was joking.

On August 12, 1776, Hume dispatched his last revisions to Strahan.

He still had to bid adieu to the woman in Paris to whom he had been so close, Mme de Boufflers. Her lover, the Prince of Conti, died on August 2, and in receipt of this sad news, Hume summoned the strength to commiserate. On August 20, he sent his final letter, in simple and direct language, eschewing his former elaborate courtesies.

He died five days later, at around 4
P.M.,
and was buried in the nearby Old Carlton cemetery (Robert Adam designed his classical cylindrical mausoleum). Not long before his death, he had told Adam Smith that he had been reading Lucian's
Dialogues of the Dead,
and that among all the excuses made to avoid stepping into Charon's boat, he could find none that fitted him. “I could not well imagine what excuse I could make to Charon in order to obtain a little delay. I have done everything of consequence which I ever meant to do; and I could at no time expect to leave my relations and friends in a better situation than that in which I am now likely to leave them. I therefore have all reason to die contented.”