Rousseau's Dog (8 page)

A rock “as big as a head” nearly landed on Rousseau's bed, and he and Thérèse huddled together by a far wall. So many stones were hurled at the house that when the local steward finally arrived, he declared, “My God. It's a quarry.”

All the local notables wanted him to go. “I gave in, and I took very little persuading; for the spectacle of the people's hatred caused me such anguish that it was more than I could bear.” He and Sultan fled Môtiers, leaving Thérèse behind, and after one night with Du Peyrou in Neuchâtel, the philosopher and the dog arrived on Isle Saint-Pierre, in Lake Bienne, just beyond the city. The territory was under the jurisdiction of Bern.

In his posthumously published
Rêveries,
Rousseau's five weeks on Isle Saint-Pierre are portrayed as blissful, passed amid an Eden of orchards, meadows, vineyards, and woods, with a solitary dwelling. His chief balm was walking and botanizing—his ambition was to compile a list of all the island's plant life. Rousseau and Sultan would ramble through a nearby island that was uninhabited, though Sultan disliked water and the boat journey made him nervous.

Isle Saint-Pierre proved a short-lived sanctuary. Thérèse joined him in late September, but on October 18, “when I was least expecting it,” he received notice from the Bern authorities that he must leave their
territory within two weeks. His plea to remain imprisoned on the island until his death, in return for being left in peace, was ignored. He told one correspondent that he was being “violently” expelled.

Within three years, Rousseau had been driven from France, banned from Geneva, and forced out of Yverdon, Môtiers, and Isle Saint-Pierre. The king of Prussia's protection had been to no avail. His enemies were triumphant. Europe's foremost radical was on the run again.

6

I
NVITED IN
A
PRIL
1763 to take the post, Francis Seymour Conway, earl of Hertford, was the first British ambassador to France after the
Treaty of Paris put an end to the Seven Years' War. Historians have dismissed Hertford as a mediocrity, though Hume described him as “the most amiable nobleman of the Court of England.” Quite why Hertford asked the Scottish philosopher to accompany him to the Paris embassy remains obscure. Hume was Hertford's second choice, and the most likely explanation is that his name originally came up among mutual Scottish friends in London, supported by an undersecretary of state and classical scholar, Robert Wood, whom Hume had met in 1758. Wood had studied at Glasgow University.

Why Hume said yes is clearer, for the call afforded an escape from his frustrations in Britain. His own account, in the
Life,
carries little conviction: “This offer, however inviting, I at first declined, both because I was reluctant to begin connections with the great, and because I was afraid that the civilities and gay company of Paris would prove disagreeable to a person of my age and humour; but on his Lordship's repeating the invitation, I accepted it.”

As so often before in his life, the prize was flawed. The invitation was to be Hertford's secretary, a position with £1,000 a year and the prospect of still higher office. However, officially the position was already filled—by Charles Bunbury, later Sir Charles, twenty-three years old and married to the beautiful, wild Lady Sarah Lennox. To some Bunbury was a “somewhat vain and ignorant” rake, to others an affable devotee of horse racing. (His horse won the first Derby in 1780.) The upright Hertford thought him distasteful and proposed that Hume would be his undersecretary with the promise of his taking over when Bunbury could be enticed away from the post. How the skeptical philosopher might accommodate to the pious earl was the subject of some amused speculation. In Paris, another English diplomat observed that Hertford's choice of secretary “has occasioned much laughing here. Questions are being asked whether Mr. Hume as part of the family will be obliged to attend prayers twice a day.”

A web of family and social ties connected many of those who were
now setting the course of Hume's life. Thus, on the British side, there were Hertford's brother, General Henry Seymour Conway, and their cousin Horace Walpole. Lady Hertford should not be forgotten: she was a granddaughter of Charles II, and cousin of the Duke of Grafton, a future prime minister. Their various roles also demonstrate how Hume had now mortgaged his career to London politicians and to the court.

Conway, in particular, was a leading figure on the national stage, central to this politically messy, pre-party period of cabals, nepotism, patronage, and royal influence. A staple of three contemporary governments, all weak and shaky, he nonetheless preserved a reputation as a conscientious monument to integrity and honor—so much so that he was always on the verge of resignation, with Walpole in the background urgently counseling him to stand his ground.

A member of the House of Commons from 1741 to 1784, Conway started his career in the military and rose to lieutenant general. He was handsome, with a mellifluous voice and a gracious manner, thoughtful and well read. He was also courageous, and ready to suffer for his beliefs. When he voted against George Grenville's government in February 1764 on the issue of general warrants, under which people could be arrested and property seized without prior evidence of their guilt or any personal identification (for example, the warrant could be for the arrest of “the authors of a seditious paper”), he was dismissed from his post as gentleman of the bedchamber and as the colonel of his regiment. It was seen as foul play that he should be deprived of both.

Soon after, in July 1765, when Grenville fell and the Marquess of Rockingham (known to his peers for his laziness and to the public for his zeal for horse racing) became prime minister, Conway received one of the two key offices outside the Treasury, secretary of state for the southern department, though his irresolution made him unsuitable for office and the dark skills of managing the Commons. He served under a series of fragile administrations, switching to the northern department
in 1766. The king had come to depend on him. Walpole recorded that George III told Conway, “he hoped never to have an administration of which he should not be one.”

Conway's elder brother, the Earl of Hertford, was also a confidant of George III. Religious and good-natured, he was, thought Horace Walpole, a man of “unblemished morals.” But others disparaged him as self-interested, avaricious, and ambitious. A contemporary described him in 1767 as having a “constant appetite for all preferments for himself and family, with the quickest digestion and the shortest memory of past favours of any of the present noblemen.” He was swift to distance himself from his brother's stand on general warrants; shortly after, he supplicated the king (unsuccessfully) for elevation from earl to marquess.

To their cousin Horace Walpole, fourth and youngest son, and fierce defender, of Sir Robert Walpole, we could apply the phrase used by Walter Bagehot to describe Charles Dickens: “a special correspondent for posterity.” His letters and journals provide an invaluable insider's commentary on the period—busy, well informed, unsentimental. He was a man of many parts: dilettante, wit and gossip, placeholder and M.P., a consummate expert in corridor intrigues. His father left him well provided with sinecures—to the tune of £3,400 a year—and a parliamentary seat: he is said to have visited his constituency and spoken in the House only once.

His interests and accomplishments were multifarious. He invented the gothic novel with
The Castle of Otranto,
published in 1764; he was a diarist and scholar, and a printer. He had an acute, though narrow, taste for the arts and was a jackdaw collector—everything from the country's finest collection of miniatures to a vulcanized date from Herculaneum to Cardinal Wolsey's red hat. And, of course, he created his lasting monument as the decorator and gardener of his true love, his “little Gothick castle,” Strawberry Hill, the small box of a house in Twickenham, southwest of London, that he bought in 1747, adding Gothic features over the years.

Walpole was warm, lively, generous and humane, and constantly fascinated by the ways of the world. He was patriotic, though he opined that “a good patriot is a bad citizen.” “Paris revived in me that natural passion, the love of my country's glory. I must put it out: it is a wicked passion and breathes war.” He was also a man of causes. He spoke out against the execution of Admiral Byng in 1757 for “losing” Minorca to the French (or
pour encourager les autres,
as Voltaire quipped); he was a critic of general warrants, supported a free press, was for the American colonists, and rejected slavery—”that horrid trade … it chills the blood.”

Despite these attributes, the picture that emerges of him from Parisian soirées in the freezing winter of 1765–66 is not altogether flattering. He comes across as gossipy and malicious, treating society, particularly when it involved intellectuals, as a source of sour amusement. Nonetheless, aged forty-eight, Walpole became the passion of the most formidable of Paris hostesses, his “blind, old,
débauchée
of wit,” seventy-year-old Mme du Deffand, with whom he had a correspondence of over eight hundred letters. She bequeathed him her dog, Tonton (who was not house-trained). She had an apt description of Walpole as
le fou moqueur
(madcap jester). Walpole quoted this with relish.

T
HE COSMOPOLITAN NATURE
of Anglo-French elite society is reflected in the fact that there was little hostility in France toward the embassy or visitors like Walpole, although Britain had just fought, and won, the Seven Years' War, the latest in a bloody series that punctuated relations between these two global competitors.

The Seven Years' War culminated triumphantly for Britain in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. This was Britain's hour. The British navy had carried all before it. In Canada, India, and the West Indies, French possessions fell to British arms. So did Havana, the key to Spain's West Indian empire. It seemed that Britain could outsail, outfight, and out-trade any of its European rivals.

For British merchants, alive with patriotic fervor, there were commercial spoils of victory: the colonies would supply raw materials and buy British goods. But as traders rejoiced, for the nation as a whole there were also costs. Freed from fear of a French invasion, the American colonists began to assert themselves. The expense of warfare required postwar economies, including in the navy, and forced the government to look for new sources of taxation that in turn stirred discontent in America. Inflation at home, the escalating cost of corn, and the fear of famine provoked bouts of disorder.

The Treaty of Paris, negotiated by Bute and signed on February 10, 1763, was politically contentious. The British retained most of their gains, though Bute handed back some conquests to France and Spain on the principle that such a gesture would lay the basis for future peace. It was still a major blow to French power, but George III called it a “noble treaty.” Bute's enemies, meanwhile, denounced it as “having saved England from the ruin of certain success.” Hopes that it would lead to some kind of détente took no account of the hostility embedded in the DNA of relations between France and Britain (though some Scots felt the ties of the “auld alliance” and were more comfortable in the French capital than in London). As Hume settled into Paris, the agonistic brew of fright, contempt, and admiration that permeated cross-Channel attitudes would be familiar today.

In fact, that farsighted politician and subtle diplomat, the Duc de Choiseul, then responsible for the fleet and shortly to be minister of war, was already pushing ahead with rebuilding French military power with the aim of recouping France's losses. Walpole was one of those sounding the alarm. “At my return from France, where I had perceived how much it behoved us to be on our guard against the designed hostilities of that court, as soon as their finances should enable them to renew the war, I laboured to infuse attention to our situation.”

None of this held the English nobility back from visiting Paris. Walpole went for a six-month stay in the French capital in September 1765,
and in a letter to a friend in England, he commented on the throng of his fellow citizens keeping him company: “If there is no talk in England of politics and parliaments, I can send your ladyship as much as you please from hence—or if you want English themselves, I can send you about fifty head; and I can assure you we will still be well stocked. There were three card-tables full of lords, ladies, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, the other night at Lady Berkeley's, who keeps Tuesdays.”