Montmorency. A letter to Voltaire on his poem about the Lisbon
earthquake embittered the dislike between the two, being
surreptitiously published. La Nouvelle H éloise appeared in the
same year (1760), and it was immensely popular. In 1762
appeared the Contrat social at Amsterdam, and Emile, which
was published both in the Low Countries and at Paris. For the
latter the author received 6000 livres, for the Contrat 1000.
Julie, on La Nouvelle Héloise, is a novel written in letters
describing the loves of a man of low position and a girl of
rank, her subsequent marriage to a respectable freethinker
of her own station, the mental agonies of her lover, and the
partial appeasing of the distresses of the lovers by the influence
of noble sentiment and the good offices of a philanthropic
Englishman. It is too long, the sentiment is over strained,
and severe moralists have accused it of a certain complaisance
in dealing with amatory errors; but it is full of pathos and
knowledge of the human heart. The Contrat social, as its
title implies, endeavours to base all government on the consent,
direct or implied, of the governed, and indulges in much ingenious
argument to get rid of the practical inconveniences
of such a suggestion. Emile, the second title of which is De
l'Education, is much more of a treatise than of a novel, though
a certain amount of narrative interest is kept up throughout.
Rousseau's reputation was now higher than ever, but the
term of the comparative prosperity which he had enjoyed
for nearly ten years was at hand. The Contra! social was
obviously anti-monarchic; the Nouvelle Héloise was said to
be immoral; the sentimental deism of the “Profession du
vicaire Savoyard” in Emile irritated equally the philosopher
party and the church. On June 11, 1762, Emile was condemned
by the parlement of Paris, and two days previously
Madame de Luxembourg and the prince de Conti gave the
author information that he would be arrested if he did not
Hy. They also furnished him with means of flight, and he
made for Yverdun in the territory of Bern, whence he transferred
himself to Motiers in Neuchatel, which then belonged
to Prussia. Frederick II. was not indisposed to protect the
persecuted when it cost him nothing and might bring him
fame, and in Marshal Keith, the governor of Neuchatel,
Rousseau found a true and firm friend. He was, however,
unable to be quiet or to practise any of those more or less
pious frauds which were customary at the time with the unorthodox.
The archbishop of Paris had published a pastoral
against him, and Rousseau did not let the year pass without
a Lettre d M . de Beaumont. The council of Geneva had joined
in the condemnation of Emile, and Rousseau first solemnly
renounced his citizenship, and then, in the Lettres de la montagne
(1763), attacked the council and the Genevan constitution
unsparingly. All this excited public opinion against him,
and gradually he grew unpopular in his own neighbourhood.
This unpopularity is said on uncertain authority to have culminated
in a nocturnal attack on his house., At any rate he
thought he was menaced if he was not, and migrated to the
Ile St Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, where he once more for
a short, and the last, time enjoyed that idyllic existence which
he loved. But the Bernese government ordered him to' quit
its territory. He was for some time uncertain' where to
go, and thought of Corsica (to join Paoli) and Berlin. But
finally David Hume offered him, late in 1765, an asylum in
England, and he accepted., He passed through Paris, where his
presence was tolerated for a time, and landed in England on
January 13, 1766. Thérése travelled separately, and was entrusted
to' the charge of James Boswell, who had already
made Rousseau's acquaintance. Here he had once more a
chance of settling peaceably. Severe English moralists like
Johnson thought but ill of him, but the public generally was
not unwilling to testify against French intolerance, and regarded
his sentimentalism with favour. He was lionized in
London to his heart's content and discontent, for it may truly
be said of Rousseau that he was equally indignant at neglect
and intolerant of attention. When, after not a few displays
of his strange humour, he professed himself tired of the capital,
Hume procured him a country abode in the house of Mr Davenport
at Wootton in Derbyshire. Here, though the place was
bleak and lonely, he might have been happy enough, and he
actually employed himself in writing the greater part of his
Confessions. But his habit of self-tormenting and tormenting
others never left him. His own caprices interposed some
delay in the conferring of a pension which George III. was
induced to grant him, and he took this as a crime of Hume's.
The publication of a spiteful letter (really by Horace Walpole,
one of whose worst deeds it was) in the name of the king of
Prussia made Rousseau believe that plots of the most terrible
kind were on foot against him. Finally he quarrelled with
Hume because the latter would not acknowledge all his own
friends and Rousseau's supposed enemies of the philosopher
circle to be rascals. He remained, however, at Wootton
during the year and through the winter. In May 1767 he
fled to France, addressing letters to the lord chancellor and
to General Conway, which can only be described as the letters
of a lunatic. He was received in France by the marquis de
Mirabeau (father of the great Mirabeau), of whom he soon had
enough, then by the .prince de Conti at Trye. From this
place he again fled and wandered about for some time in a
wretched fashion, still writing the Confessions, constantly
receiving generous help, and always quarrelling with, or at
least suspecting, the helpers. In the summer of 1770 he returned
to Paris, resumed music-copying, and was on the whole
happier than he had been since he had to leave Montlouis.
He had by this time married Therese le Vasseur, or had at
least gone through some form of marriage with her.
Many of the best-known stories of Rousseau's life date from
this last time, when he was tolerably accessible to visitors,
though clearly half-insane. He finished his Confessions, wrote
his Dialogues (the interest of which is not quite equal to the
promise of their curious sub-title, Rousseau jugede Jean J aoques),
and began his Réveries du promeneur solitaire, intended as a
sequel and complement to the Confessions, and one of the
best of all his books. It should be said that besides these,
which complete the list of his principal works, he has left a
very large number of minor works and a considerable correspondence.
During this time he lived in the Rue Platiere,
which is now named after him. But his suspicions of secret
enemies grew stronger rather than weaker, and at the beginning
of 1778 he was glad to accept the offer of M. de Girardin,
a rich financier, and occupy a cottage at Ermenonville. The
country was beautiful; but his old terrors revived, and his
woes were complicated by the alleged inclination of Thérese
for one of M. de Girardin's stable-boys. On July 2nd he died
in a manner which has been much discussed, suspicions of
suicide being circulated at the time by Grimm and others.1
There is little doubt that for the last ten or fifteen' years
of his life, if not from the time of his quarrel with Diderot and
Madame d'Epinay, Rousseau was not wholly sanwthe combined
influence of late and unexpected literary fame and of
constant solitude and discomfort acting upon his excitable
temperament so as to overthrow the balance, never very stable,
of his fine and acute but unrobust intellect. He was by no
means the only man of letters of his time who had to submit
to something like persecution. Fréron on the orthodox side
had his share of it, as well as Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot
and Montesquieu on that of the innovators But Rousseau
had not, like Montesquieu, a position which guaranteed him
from serious danger; he was not wealthy like Helvétius, he
had not the wonderful suppleness and trickiness which even
without his wealth would probably have defended Voltaire
himself; and he lacked entirely the “ bottom” of Fréron and
Diderot. When he was molested he could only shriek at his
1 The local inquiry into the death, on the following day, resulted
in a certificate that he died of apoplexy; but the story that he
shot himself persisted. In December 1897 Rousseau's coffin in the
Panthéon was opened, and M. Berthelot, who examined the skull,
found no trace of injury by a bullet; and on the whole there is no
reason to doubt the verdict of the original inquiry at Er1?§ nonvi§ le.
CH.
Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/818
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