The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (105 page)

Rousseau did not abandon this Thérèse, nor did she abandon him, despite his numerous amatory interludes with other women. “At first I decided to improve her mind; I was wasting my time.… I lived as pleasantly with my Thérèse as with the finest genius in the world.” He supported her along with her aging mother as best he could. And he did finally “marry” her in 1768 in a bizarre ceremony of his own devising with the authority of no ecclesiastical body, at the Auberge de la Fontaine d’Or at Bourgoin, near Grenoble. To dignify the occasion he invited the mayor and two witnesses. There were no legal formalities, but some have called this “the most genuine act he had ever performed.” He gave a speech that moved all present to tears. “I have never fulfilled any duty so gladly or so willingly,” he declared in a sober interval. “I owed at least this to the woman for whom my respect has only increased during an attachment which has lasted now for twenty-five years, and who has resolved to share all the misfortunes in store for me, rather than be parted from me.” Thereafter Thérèse was finally known as Mme. Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Their union appears to have produced five children, all of whom were deposited at birth at the Foundlings’ Hospital. “I cheerfully resolved on this course without the least scruple.” This would be his most widely self-advertised sin, of which he boasted and which he never ceased to defend. “In handing my children over for the State to educate,” he wrote in the
Confessions
, “for lack of means to bring them up myself, by destining them workers and peasants instead of adventurers and fortune-hunters, I thought I was acting as a citizen and a father, and looked upon myself as a member of Plato’s Republic.… I have often blessed Heaven for having thus safeguarded them from their father’s fate, and from that which would have overtaken them at the moment when I should have been compelled to abandon them.… I am sure that they would have been led to hate, and perhaps to betray, their parents. It is a hundred times better that they had never known them.”

An aura of legend and mendacity surrounds these children, like almost
every other “fact” in Rousseau’s life and confessions. The practice of abandoning unwanted children, Rousseau said, was “the custom of the country.” In Rousseau’s lifetime the number and proportion of abandoned children was increasing. Buffon noted that in 1772 they numbered about one third of all children born in Paris. The philosopher-encyclopédiste d’Alembert (1717?–1783) was abandoned by his mother, the eminent writer and saloniste Claudine de Tencin (1685–1749), on the steps of the church of Saint-Jean-le-Rond. When found, he was given the name Jean le Rond, which he kept throughout his life. Since no trace of Rousseau’s children has been found outside Rousseau’s letters and confessions, some biographers have doubted their existence. Others note that the very purpose of the foundling institution was to make it possible to dispose of infants without leaving any record. Perhaps, some suggest, Rousseau simply imagined these offspring to refute the rumors of his impotence.

Still, Rousseau, who refused to nurture his own children, held himself out as an expert on child-rearing. His
Émile, or Education
insisted that mothers breast-feed their children, and offered some little ways to help the individuality of each infant to blossom. Cultivation of the mind should be postponed while the emotions were fostered. He would guide John Dewey and other twentieth-century educationists who have shared Rousseau’s hostility to the rigid discipline of classical education. And
Emile
offered a perverse apology for his own callousness.

Rousseau’s confessions would be an apology for his whole life. “Sincerity,” wrote La Rochefoucauld, “is a desire to compensate for one’s defects and even reduce their importance by winning credit for admitting them.” If admitting faults is a proper claim to respect, Rousseau should be among the most respected of modern men. It is perhaps appropriate that the prototype of modern “true” confessions was written by a madman.

A publisher had solicited Rousseau to write his autobiography, but he produced only a few fragments. Voltaire provided him with the incentive to write an autobiography in self-defense by portraying Rousseau as a monster, enemy of Geneva and of Christ, and so sparking the “lapidation” of Rousseau at his Swiss mountain retreat. Increasing paranoia focused Rousseau’s writing, composed in lucid intervals. The first part of the
Confessions
was written at Wootten under Hume’s auspices, in 1766 during his English refuge from Swiss and French persecutors. The second part was written after his flight to France in 1766–70, this time in refuge from the imaginary conspiracy led by Hume. As Rousseau explained:

Saint Augustine’s
Confessions
, the principal work of that title in the Western tradition, may have been in his mind, but Rousseau left it to his reader to make the comparison. While he never ceased to see himself as a martyr, he did not quite claim sainthood. But Saint Augustine’s is no confession in the modern mode, for he “confesses” to the infinite wisdom of God. “For love of Thy love I do it.” Rousseau “confesses” to the greatness and uniqueness of “myself.”

Imagining himself the victim of malicious conspiracy by his contemporaries, Rousseau hoped by his
Confessions
at least to secure the esteem of posterity. But he was impatient. When he returned to Paris in 1770, he was a pitiful spectacle, afflicted with a painful bladder complaint, aged beyond his fifty-three years, haunted by hosts of nameless spies. Everywhere he went
they
seemed to follow him. His books were enriching only his publishers. In those days before the legal rights of authors, his own experience justified Voltaire’s description of printers as “pirates.” He eked out a living by returning to copying music at tenpence a page.

Still sought after in the fashionable salons, Rousseau was eager for an audience to whom he could “defend” himself, though against whom or what was never quite clear. Though determined not to publish his
Confessions
, he entertained salon wits and courtesans with readings from them. Having given up his affectation of colorful Armenian costume, he wore a peasant’s drab gray as he intoned his sensational apologies for himself. His last reading was at the home of the comtesse d’Egmont, daughter of the maréchal de Richelieu. The poet Dorat (1734–1780) reported one of these sessions lasting from nine o’clock in the morning until three o’clock the following morning. To the last Book of the
Confessions
Rousseau appended his own account of his final words at the reading of his manuscript to Count and Countess d’Egmont, Prince Pignatelli, and other titled Parisians.

Mme. d’Épinay, one of his surviving liaisons, picked up the challenge and persuaded the lieutenant of police to order Rousseau to cease his readings. But the
Confessions
reached posterity in various forms with other works of self-revelation published (1781–88) after his death. And they were promptly translated.

Rousseau’s
Confessions
, his most distinctive creation, marks a new era in literature, with a new form for the writer’s candor. And this first full-blown modern revelation of the self was written by a madman. Is there any better evidence of Rousseau’s madness than his belief that this work of boastful self-denigration could rescue his reputation? Modern “literature” would not simply use language for communicating but would become a self-regarding act. Authors would celebrate themselves by the mere act of self-revelation. Rousseau, a pathfinder for this modern literature, offers us a seductive if somewhat unpleasant adventure into the Rousseauan self. Although the
Confessions
is a new literary form, it is not quite as formless as the essay. While Montaigne’s essays are topical, Rousseau’s chapters are chronological, pursuing the miscellany of the author’s experience with the charm of surprise and disorder, the suspense of a stream of consciousness. Our interest is increased by our doubt that he is telling the whole story.

Rousseau recounts in several places the episodes that made him think it necessary to write these confessions. When he was at Mme. de Vercellis’s he accused an innocent servant girl of stealing a little pink and silver ribbon, which he himself had taken. That, “the sole offense that I have committed … secured me for the rest of my life against any act that might prove criminal in its results. I think also that my loathing of untruth derives to a large extent from my having told that one wicked lie.” Another was his disgraceful abandonment on the streets of Lyons of a friend and fellow musician who had fallen in an epileptic fit.

Having made for himself in literature a secular equivalent for the confessional, he felt free to write with abandon passages that were sometimes omitted from popular editions or bowdlerized in translation. Incidentally he recorded the last words of his patroness, Mme. de Vercellis, which have been undeservedly forgotten:

Though pretending to full revelation, he still does not confess as vividly as became customary in the twentieth century.

His inhibitions appear in the episode that he says “plainly reveals my character” and will give the reader “complete knowledge of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In Venice he visited the attractive young Giulietta. “I entered a courtesan’s room as if it were the sanctuary of love and beauty; in her person I saw the divinity.… No sooner did I recognize from our first familiarities the value of her charms and caresses than, fearing to lose the fruit prematurely, I tried to make haste and pluck it. Suddenly, instead of the fire that devoured me, I felt a deathly cold flow through my veins; my legs trembled; I sat down on the point of fainting, and wept like a child.” He gives us the shocking explanation. “Just as I was about to sink upon a breast which seemed about to suffer a man’s lips and hand for the first time, I perceived that she had a malformed nipple. I beat my brow, looked harder and made certain that this nipple did not match the other.” He was frozen in horror. “I saw as clear as daylight that instead of the most charming creature I could possibly imagine I held in my arms some kind of monster, rejected by Nature, men, and love.” He told Giulietta his horror. First she took his comment as a joke, blushed, adjusted her clothes, and walked about the room fanning herself. “Finally she said to me in a cold and scornful voice: ‘Gianetto, lascia le donne, e studia la matematica.’ ” (“Johnny, give up women, and study mathematics.”) Jean-Jacques still asked her for another appointment, but when he arrived three days later she had left for Florence. He confessed and regretted what must have been her “scornful memory of me.” Again and again he reports his similar dismay at being displaced by others from the bed of his successive patronesses.

As we witness Rousseau’s painful effort to reveal his true self he reminds us how elusive is this person whom he imagines himself to be, transformed by the very process of being revealed. You cannot know the later self, he explains, without knowing the earlier self. And he prefaces the second half of the
Confessions:
“What a different picture I shall soon have to fill in! After favouring my wishes for thirty years, for the next thirty fate opposed them and from this continued opposition between my situation and my desires will be seen to arise great mistakes, incredible misfortunes, and every virtue that can do credit to adversity except strength of character.” We join Rousseau’s adventure in search of himself.

O
NE
of the most famous writings by Benjamin Franklin was the epitaph he wrote for himself in 1728, at the age of twenty-two: “The Body of B Franklin Printer, (Like the cover of an old Book Its contents torn out and stript of its Lettering & Gilding) Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be lost; For it will (as he believ’d) appear once more, In a new and more elegant Edition Revised and corrected, by the Author.” This epitaph proved appropriate to a life filled with personal events that survived in what Franklin printed about them. His momentous discoveries in electricity were printed as letters. His political tracts were commonly written as episodes of life. His
Poor Richard
, sometimes called the first famous character of fiction created by an American, is really an alter ego chronicled in the first person whose maxims are Franklin’s personally tested prescription for his own success. In his
Autobiography
Franklin repeatedly characterized the missteps in his life as
Errata
, items to be corrected in a printed record.