Rousseau's Dog (6 page)

Mme de Boufflers sought to persuade Rousseau to go to England, where she could introduce him to several acquaintances including the “celebrated Hume,” whom she had known for a long while. She pointed out that if he were arrested and interrogated, he might incriminate his current patron, Mme de Luxembourg. (Rousseau agreed he might, as he always told the truth.) She also floated the notion of arranging a spell for him in the Bastille—presumably in comfort—as prisoners of the state there were immune from the Paris parlement's power of arrest. The prospect did not appeal.

T
HE EVENTS OF
the night of June 9, 1762, in Mont-Louis make the most dramatic episode in the
Confessions.
They signaled that yet again the Genevan would have to move on—this time as the fugitive he would be for the next eight years.

It was two in the morning. Rousseau was awake; he had just closed his Bible on the story of the Levite of Ephraim. Voices echoed, torches flared, and footsteps sounded in the stillness of the dark countryside. Mme de Luxembourg's confidential servant, La Roche, burst in with a note from Mme de Luxembourg. It contained a letter from the Prince de Conti saying the Paris courts were determined to proceed against Rousseau with all severity: “The excitement is very high. Nothing can avert the blow.” Rousseau must go to Mme de Luxembourg, La Roche declared. She would not rest until she had seen him.

Rousseau found her upset; he had never known her in such a state. But at this critical moment, he could rely on such influential friends to
stave off his arrest. The maréchal arrived, trailed by Mme de Boufflers with the latest news from Paris. A writ of
prise de corps
had been issued against Rousseau by the parlement.
Émile
was ordered to be burned by the public executioner. However, Conti had secured a concession: if Rousseau escaped, he would not be pursued. He could even take a few days to think over his plans.

Rousseau declined the breathing space. At four that afternoon he departed for Switzerland, riding in plain view in an open cabriolet belonging to the maréchal. His route took him through Paris, where he passed the officers of the law, “four men in black in a hired coach who saluted me with smiles.”

He left Thérèse to follow him with his papers. It was the first time they had been separated for sixteen years.

5

F
ROM
1762
TO
late 1765, Rousseau's fate was to be shunted along the northern shore of Lake Neuchâtel, in a futile quest for a secure refuge.

The proud citizen of Geneva deliberately avoided his home city. He believed it was too susceptible to French influence, a judgment that was vindicated almost immediately. On June 18, 1762, Geneva's ruling body, the Petit Conseil, assembled to discuss his case, voting the next day that if he ever stepped inside the city he would be arrested. They ordered
the burning of
On the Social Contract,
as well as
Émile.
Helping to orchestrate the campaign against him was another member of the powerful Tronchin clan, Jean-Robert Tronchin, the prosecutor general in Geneva who had presented the case for suppressing the two books.

Rousseau came to rest first in Yverdon, a spa town under the jurisdiction of Bern at the southern tip of the lake, on the edge of the triangle formed by Geneva, Zurich, and Basel. But the Council of Bern promptly followed Geneva's lead. On July 1, 1762, a session of the Bernese Senate resolved both to forbid the sale of
Émile
and to expel the author from the republic. He was given fifteen days to leave. Behind this decree lay the hand of the Paris parlement. The parlement had exercised its influence before: at its behest, in 1758, the government of Berne ordered all the impressions of Helvétius's
Of the Spirit
and of Voltaire's
Maiden
to be seized for burning. The Bernese were capable of ironic resistance. On this occasion, the officer of justice came into the council to report: “Your magnificences, after all possible searches, throughout the town we have been able to find only a little spirit and not one maiden.”

On July 10, 1762, Rousseau moved north to the village of Môtiers. The village sits above the lake at the bottom of the Val de Travers, a wide valley between the gorges of the Jura and Lake Neuchâtel, and midway between Yverdon and the fortress city from which the lake takes its name. Home was to be a run-down dwelling owned by the niece of an old friend. Ever sensitive to his independence, Rousseau insisted on paying rent. Le Vasseur soon joined him.

Understandably, Rousseau remained on his guard. At the end of July, he wrote to Mme de Boufflers about the turbulent local priests: “They behold me with horror; it is with great reluctance that they suffer me to enter their temples.” He accused “the poet Voltaire” and “the juggler” (trickster) Tronchin of rousing the priests. He was waiting to hear from the king of Prussia about asylum in Môtiers, he added.

By a quirk of dynastic fate, the territory of Neuchâtel was under the jurisdiction of Prussia, whose ruler, Frederick the Great, was the highest ranking of Rousseau's admirers. In addition to being a brilliant military strategist, Frederick was a connoisseur of the arts and a patron of the Enlightenment, his application of Enlightenment principles to government earning him the accolade of “philosopher king” and the censure of “enlightened despot.” (Like Rousseau, he was also a pet lover: when his favorite dog was ill, he summoned ten doctors.) He had appointed a Jacobite exile as Neuchâtel's governor, the hereditary earl marshal of Scotland, George Keith, Earl Marischal. Portraits of the earl show a thin, long, drawn face and an aquiline nose.

The earl had fled Scotland as a youth after joining the Jacobite uprising of 1715; he then took part in the Jacobite-Spanish landing on the west coast in 1719. Following that fiasco, in which he was badly wounded, he was tried in absentia and outlawed. He entered Frederick's service, becoming ambassador to France and to Spain. The king also bestowed on him the Neuchâtel governorship, which became a none-too-arduous retirement post. Marischal was pardoned by George II in 1759, but though he visited Scotland and bought back one of his former estates, he could not feel at home. The septuagenarian earl—”his opinions were as tolerant as his nature was kind”—became a father figure for Rousseau, who was a regular guest at his château, calling the governor
mon père,
and being addressed back as
mon fils,
or “my son the savage.”

In requesting asylum, Rousseau showed both confidence in his standing and trust in the graciousness of despots. Earlier, he had been critical of Frederick the Great, but, according to Marischal, Frederick thought it wrong “that a man of an irreproachable life is to be persecuted because his sentiments are singular.” The king proffered wine, corn, and firewood, believing Rousseau would accept gifts in kind more readily than money. He also wanted to build him a hermitage with a little garden. Rousseau said no: he would rather
eat grass and grub up roots than accept a morsel of bread that he had not earned.

Earl Marischal had another useful contact: he was a staunch friend and admirer of David Hume's. He cautioned Hume that Rousseau was vulnerable in Neuchâtel because of “the power of the people.” Britain was a better bet.

The earl was not alone in thinking of Britain. Rousseau recorded that Mme de Boufflers strongly disapproved of his going to Switzerland, “and made fresh endeavours to persuade me to go to England. I remained unshaken. I have never liked England or the English; and all Mme de Boufflers' eloquence, far from overcoming my repugnance, served for some reason to increase it.”

Mme de Boufflers had initiated a correspondence with Hume not long before, sending him a note about how utterly “sublime” she considered his books. Like Earl Marischal, she sought to engage Hume in the quest to secure Rousseau asylum. She wrote to the Scottish historian in mid-June 1762 to say that she had advised Rousseau to go to England, adding a character study. There was praise for the Genevan's “eccentric, upright heart [and his] noble and disinterested soul.” Dependency he dreaded: he would rather make his living copying music than receive benefits from his best friends. Only in solitude could he be happy. “I do not believe you will find anywhere a man more gentle, more humane, more compassionate to the sorrows of others, and more patient under his own. In short, his virtue appears so pure, so contented, so equal, that until now, those who hated him could find only in their hearts reasons for suspecting him.”

Hume cast aside his customary moderation to live up to her enthusiasm for a man with whom he had no previous connection. He had, Hume gushed, “esteem, I had almost said veneration, for [Rousseau's] virtue and genius. I assure your ladyship there is no man in Europe of whom I have entertained a higher idea and would be prouder to serve. … I revere his greatness of mind, which makes him fly obligations
and dependence; and I have the vanity to think, that through the course of my life I have endeavoured to resemble him in those maxims.”

Hume, who was in Edinburgh, added that he had connections with men of rank in London and would make “them sensible of the honour M. Rousseau has done us in choosing an asylum in England. We are happy at present in a king, who has a taste for literature; and I hope M. Rousseau will find the advantage of it, and that he will not disdain to receive benefits from a great monarch who is sensible of his merit.” However, the hero-worship was qualified. Hume disparaged
Émile,
in which, intermingled with genius, there was “some degree of extravag ance. … [O]ne would be apt to suspect that he chooses his topics less from persuasion, than from the pleasure of showing his invention, and surprising the reader by his paradoxes.”

The Scotsman offered the Genevan the use of his house in Edinburgh for as long as he liked. Later Hume explained, “No other motive was wanting to incite me to this act of humanity than the account given me of M. Rousseau's personal character by the friend who had recommended him.” Hume also made overtures about a royal pension for Rousseau: he believed that assisting Rousseau would yield a propaganda triumph over the French worth a hundred victories in battle.

In return, Rousseau, a spirit of intuition, imagination, and feeling, rhapsodized to Mme de Boufflers about the detachment of David Hume:

However, Rousseau went on, he was deterred by the distance and expense of the journey to England. Nor did he relish inhaling the
“black vapours” of London streets. “[H]abit has so attached me to a country life, that I die with spleen the moment I am no longer in the immediate vicinity of trees and bushes.”

As the November chill gripped Môtiers, Earl Marischal resigned himself to the exile's remaining there. He notified Mme de Boufflers that Rousseau had even turned down a proposal of accommodation at Colombiers, a medieval town on the lake, a stone's throw from Neuchâtel, where the weather was milder and there were ample fruit and vegetables that would otherwise rot. “He is much more savage than any savage of America,” he said, meaning that while a hungry savage would accept fish offered by another savage who had caught too much, Rousseau would refuse. “I no longer talk to our friend about quitting his mountain.” In this letter, Marischal described his plan (“a mere castle in the air”) for Rousseau, Hume, and him to live in scholarly retreat on his newly recovered Scottish property, and added a paradox: “One of the principal reasons, which would induce Jean-Jacques to realize this project is, that
he is not conversant in the language of the country.
This, on his part, is a reason perfectly in character; and perhaps, after all, it is a good one.”

Meanwhile, the long-distance paper relationship between Rousseau and Hume was evolving and deepening. In early 1763, Rousseau confided to Hume that he regretted trusting his own countrymen, who had treated him with insult and outrage, rather than going to England. Earl Marischal had