Rousseau's Dog (12 page)

H
UME HAD BEEN
kept abreast of Rousseau's predicament. In March 1765, a brilliant young mathematician, Alexis-Claude Clairaut (working from Newtonian principles, he had predicted the return of Halley's Comet in 1759), had shown Hume a “pathetic letter” from Rousseau, depicting the beleaguered exile as subsisting in abject misery and penury. Hume responded with a plan he circulated among friends of
Clairaut's and Rousseau's in Paris. Aware of Rousseau's reluctance to accept anything that smacked of charity, they intended a degree of subterfuge. The idea was to arrange for the London publication of his
Dictionary of Music,
and to slip the publisher additional money to pass off to the author as “royalties.”

Urging Hume to assist Rousseau was yet another noblewoman, the Marquise de Verdelin. (She was close to Rousseau's would-be
amour,
Sophie d'Houdetot.) He first encountered the marquise during his stay at the Hermitage in 1757. She was twenty-nine, and had a pale face and a strikingly long neck. Rousseau must have given an ill-mannered impression, stalking off when she turned up with Mme d'Houdetot. She then came to see him at Mont-Louis but did not catch him at home. When he failed to return her visits, she sent him pots of flowers for his terrace, forcing his acknowledgment.

Rousseau thought Mme de Verdelin distinctly unappealing. “Spiteful remarks and witticisms rise so simply to her lips that one needs to be perpetually on the watch—a very tiring thing for me—to see when one is being laughed at.” The strictures in the
Confessions
run on. “I rarely heard her say anything good of her absent friends without slipping in some damaging word. What she did not construe in some bad sense, she turned to ridicule.” Her incessant notes and messages were a nuisance, “unendurable.”

Mme de Verdelin's father was an impecunious nobleman who had married her off at the age of twenty-two to a rich marquis more than four decades her senior. Her persistence and her many kind letters to Rousseau at Môtiers eventually won him over. She even became a soul mate. In times of trouble they consoled each other, and this need for each other's company, Rousseau conceded, made him overlook her flaws. “Nothing draws two hearts together so much as the pleasure of weeping together.” He records the satisfaction it gave him when she and her daughter visited him at Môtiers, where they witnessed how he was persecuted. Mme de Verdelin implored him to flee to England.

Clairaut's untimely death on May 17 had put an end to the original project for rescuing Rousseau. At the express desire of Mme de Verdelin, after she returned to Paris from Môtiers in October, Hume began to collaborate on the scheme for Rousseau's escape to England. (Curiously, Mme de Verdelin was one of the few French noblewomen immune to Hume's charms. “Mr. Hume is the darling of all the pretty women here; that is probably why he is not one with me.”) Hume's representative in London was to be John Stewart, who traveled from Paris with his instructions. Gilbert Elliot would lend a helping hand. The new idea was for Rousseau and his
gouvernante
to be provided with rooms and board in the country at fifty to sixty pounds a year, of which he would pay only twenty to twenty-five. Hume would privately make up the difference.

Meanwhile, Rousseau had been driven on. Yverdon, Môtiers, Isle Saint-Pierre. Now his flight took him on October 27,1765, to the small lakeside city of Bienne. He had received so warm a welcome, he told Du Peyrou that same day, that he hoped to winter there and in the spring go to England, “where I ought to have gone in the first place.” Mme de Verdelin received the same message. She had promised to arrange a
laissez-passer
for him to cross French territory on his way into exile. Rousseau seemed to have made a volte-face: he told her that England was “the only country where some liberty remains.” But in fact, he had still not finally made up his mind. Invitations had arrived from Vienna and Corsica; Prussia and Silesia were also canvassed. The main contender was Berlin, where Earl Marischal had promised asylum, though he worried that the climate was too cold. However, Rousseau was mistaken about Bienne's hospitality. On October 28, he told Du Peyrou that he was leaving on the morrow—before he was chased out. Forty-eight hours later he was in Basel writing to Le Vasseur. He would head for Strasbourg; after that he did not know what he would do. He added that during the journey Sultan had done ten leagues at a gallop.

He left Switzerland, “that murderous land,” never to set foot in it again, and headed north, back into France.

On the second day of November, Rousseau entered Strasbourg (French territory since 1697) and put up at an inn, La Fleur. There he received a fateful letter from Hume. It had been dispatched from Fontainebleau on October 22, the address written by Mme de Verdelin:
à Monsieur Rousseau à Isle Saint Pierre au Canton de Berne en Suisse.

Not expecting to assume personal charge of Rousseau's welfare or even to be in England if Rousseau sought refuge there, Hume trod carefully in his approach to the exile. He was “afraid of being in the number of those troublesome people, who, on the pretence of being your admirers, never cease persecuting you with their letters.” However, he continued, if Rousseau still wished to go to London, he had arranged for Gilbert Elliot to take care of him. “If you let him know of your arrival, he will immediately wait on you, and will conduct you to your retreat. … As the English booksellers can afford higher prices to authors than those of Paris, you will have no difficulty to live frugally in that country on the fruits of your own industry. I mention this circumstance, because I am well acquainted with your resolution of laying mankind under obligations to you, without allowing them to make you any return.” In England, Rousseau would be free of persecution, “not only [because of] the tolerating spirit of our laws, but from the respect, which everyone there bears to your character.”

Rousseau responded from Strasbourg, on December 4, to “the most illustrious of my contemporaries, a man whose goodness surpasses his fame,” and put himself under Hume's wing, apparently without qualms:

He was already thinking ahead to how he could best organize his passage. In a letter to Mme de Verdelin, he wrote, “p.s. I forgot to tell you, Madame, that I will find at Paris a companion for the journey to London. He is a business man, and these people have, and procure, great facilities for travel.” Jean-Jacques de Luze was a prominent citizen of Neuchâtel, and president of the Corn Exchange. Thérèse was still in Isle Saint-Pierre—Rousseau would have to send for her later. “I really cannot drag her with me … until I have found a refuge.”

However, exhausted by nervous stress and the constant journeying, Rousseau was in no hurry. Initially, he took meals alone at the inn with only Sultan for company, but when word spread that he was in town, local people queued to pay their respects, and he became caught up in a social whirl. The director of the theater even put on a packed and rapturously received production of
Le Devin du village,
and then offered to stage Rousseau's plays. But on December 9 at seven in the morning, Rousseau left for Paris. His post chaise rolled through Porte Saint-Antoine exactly one week later.

At last the Swiss fugitive would come face-to-face with his Scottish patron.

H
OW THE OPENING
encounter between saved and savior went appears not to have been recorded by either. Indeed, there is a mysterious lacuna in Rousseau's letters from this period as a whole: missing are any details of his time together with Hume. One would be hard put to know they had even met. However, to Mme de Verdelin, on December 18, Rousseau made apparent his gratitude. He was, he said, “even more touched than proud because of the interest this sublime genius deigns to take in me.”

At the end of December, Hume wrote an unreserved panegyric to Blair, comparing Rousseau to Socrates—only with more genius—and, like a starry-eyed lover, seeing beauty in his adored one's blemishes:

Hume also reported that he had been assured (not saying by whom) that “at times he believes he has inspirations from an immediate communication with the Divinity: he falls sometimes into ecstasies which retain him in the same posture for hours together.”

R
OUSSEAU'S APPEARANCE IN
Paris coincided with a prolonged spell of dreadful weather. Walpole complained that there had not been two good days together since October: he had not anticipated living in Siberia. Happily for Rousseau, his lodgings offered every protection.

He was initially housed with the widow of his recently deceased Paris publisher Nicolas-Bonaventure Duchesne, but after three days, Conti moved him to the Hôtel Saint-Simon in the Temple, which afforded him both luxury and security, though Hume reported to Blair that the magnificence of the apartment made the Swiss uneasy.

It would have been natural for a wanted man given such sanctuary to remain out of sight and to stay within the Temple precincts, where he could welcome guests. Not Rousseau. Although he told his correspondents that he was resolved to remain unobtrusive, he paraded through the streets, his Armenian costume flapping, Sultan by his side. Perhaps
he had been notified that the parlement had decided not to enforce its warrant while he was merely passing through.

In the
Correspondance littéraire,
Grimm recorded that Rousseau received a multitude of visitors in the hotel and that the day after his entrance into Paris,

An observer said that “if you asked one half of the people what they were doing, they replied they wanted to see Jean-Jacques; and if asked who he was, they replied that they did not know anything about that, but that they were waiting to see him pass.” In a belated report about the buzz from Paris, the St.
James's Chronicle
of January 21 informed its readers that the “celebrated Rousseau” was “perpetually besieged by crowds that thronged to see him.” One of those paying homage was the fugitive radical John Wilkes, who might have had some sympathy with his fellow exile, if not with his Scottish sponsor.

In letters to Edinburgh, Hume left a sketch of their first conversations in the Temple. Rousseau spoke about his treatment in Switzerland by the mob in Neuchâtel: the stone bench laid above his door, the woman who objected to his theology and who said she would have liked to blow out his brains, his being banned by the canton of Bern. As related to Hume, all this was the consequence more of his democratic than of his religious principles. (That was certainly Dr. Tronchin's view. The citizens of Geneva, he complained, had been inspired to campaign for political reform by
On the Social Contract.
)

Hume acted as Rousseau's Temple gatekeeper, waving away those visitors he considered undesirable or unwelcome to his charge. Mme de Boufflers, his supporter and fellow resident of the Temple, was present
when Rousseau remarked how odd it was that he should be so beloved by Frenchwomen whose morals he had decried and so hated by Swiss women whom he had so much extolled. She resolved the paradox gracefully: “We are fond of you because we know that, however much you might rail, you are at bottom fond of us to distraction. But the Swiss women hate you, because they are conscious that they have not merit to deserve your attention.”

Indeed, according to Hume, ladies beseeched him to introduce them to Rousseau: “Were I to open a subscription with his consent, I should receive £50,000 in a fortnight. … Voltaire and everybody else are quite eclipsed by him.” “Even his maid La [sic] Vasseur who is very homely and very awkward, is more talked of than the Princess of Morocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity and attachment toward him.” As Mlle Le Vasseur was still in Switzerland, it is not clear how Hume actually knew what she looked like, but he was plainly the recipient of gossip about Rousseau from his
philosophe
friends. He went on: “His very dog, who is no better than a coly [sic], has a name and reputation in the world.” (Hume might not have been so dismissive had Sultan been a socially acceptable spaniel.) De Luze remarked that the
gouvernante
was the chief cause of his leaving Neuchâtel: “She passes as wicked and quarrelsome, and tattling.”

Robert Liston (a tutor to the sons of one of Hume's friends), who suffered badly from Rousseau fever, did gain access. On the morning of Rousseau's departure for London, Liston was introduced to him at the Hôtel Saint-Simon. This involved an encounter with Mme de Boufflers, ingenuously described by Liston as “a very famous woman and a great protectress of men of learning” who “made me some compliments.” Rousseau received him “very well. I was about an hour there, saw him dine, and had the honour to help him into the chaise. He said he would be glad to crack [converse] with me when I came to England
&c. His person is very thin & delicate looking, his face, and especially his sharp black eyes, promise everything he has shown himself possessed of. His manners simple and affable.”