A Place in the Country

J’AURAIS VOULU QUE CE LAC EÛT ÉTÉ L’OCÉAN — On the occasion of a visit to the Île Saint-Pierre

At the end of September 1965, having moved to the French-speaking part of Switzerland to continue my studies, a few days before the beginning of the semester I took a trip to the nearby Seeland, where, starting from Ins, I climbed up the so-called Schattenrain. It was a hazy sort of day, and I remember how, on reaching the edge of the small wood covering the slope, I paused to look back down at the path I had come by, at the plain stretching away to the north crisscrossed by the straight lines of canals, with the hills shrouded in mist beyond; and how, when I emerged once more into the fields above the village of Lüscherz, I saw spread out below me the Lac de Bienne, and sat there for an hour or more lost in thought at the sight, resolving that at the earliest opportunity I would cross over to the island in the lake, which, on that autumn day, was flooded with a trembling pale light. As so often happens in life, however, it took another thirty-one years before this plan could be realized and I was finally able, in the early summer of 1996, in the company of an exceedingly obliging host who lived high above the steep shores of the lake and who habitually wore a kind of captain’s cap, smoked Indian bidis, and seldom spoke, to make the journey across the lake from the city of Bienne to the island of Saint-Pierre, formed during the last ice age by the retreating Rhône glacier into the shape of a whale’s back — or so it is generally said. The ship which took us along the edge of the Jura massif where it plunges steeply into the lake was called the Ville de Fribourg. Among the other passengers on board were the gaudily attired members of a male-voice choir, who several times during the short crossing struck up from the stern a chorus of “Là-haut sur la montagne, Les jours s’en vont” or another such Swiss refrain, with the sole intention, or so it seemed to me, of reminding me, with the curiously strained, guttural notes their ensemble produced, of how far I had come meanwhile from my place of origin.

Apart from a single farmstead, there is now only one dwelling on the Île Saint-Pierre — an island with a circumference of some two miles — and that is a former Cluniac monastery which now houses a hotel and restaurant run by Blausee AG. After walking there from the landing stage, I sat for a while drinking coffee with my companion in the shady trellised courtyard, until it was time for him to take his leave and I watched from the gate as he made his way slowly down the white path, just like a sailor who, I thought to myself, after years of sailing the high seas finds himself washed up on the unfamiliar mainland once more. The room I took at the hotel looked out on the south side of the building, directly adjacent to the two rooms which Jean-Jacques Rousseau occupied when, in September 1765, exactly two hundred years before my first sight of the island from the top of the Schattenrain, he found refuge here, at least until the Berne Petit Conseil drove him out from even this last outpost of his native land. “By Saturday next,” as an edict sent to the Bailli in Nidau stated, “the said M. Rousseau is to remove himself from your Excellencies’ territories and shall not be permitted to return save under pain of the severest penalty.” In the decades after Rousseau’s death, when his fame had spread throughout Europe and beyond, an endless procession of illustrious personages visited the island to see for themselves the place in which the philosopher, novelist, autobiographer, and inventor of the bourgeois cult of romantic sensibility was for a brief period — as he claims in the fifth Promenade in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker—happier than in any other place. The adventurer and confidence trickster Cagliostro, the French conseiller du Parlement Desjobert, the English statesman Thomas Pitt, diverse kings of Prussia, Sweden, and Bavaria, all came to the island, not least among them the former Empress Joséphine. Early in the morning of the thirtieth of September 1810, hours before the arrival of the most beautiful woman of her day, a crowd a thousand strong was already waiting by the shore, and on the lake itself the ships and boats garlanded with flowers and flags thronged together in such numbers that the water could scarcely be seen. And when, twenty years later, the Poles arrived in Switzerland after the violent suppression of their uprising, the island on more than one occasion served as a meeting place where the refugees — for many a source of admiration — and the liberals who sympathized with their cause organized ceremonies to commemorate those who had fallen in the fight for freedom. On one such occasion in 1833, as Werner Henzi recalls in his prospectus of the Rousseau island, an enthusiastic crowd surrounded an altar set up between two chestnut trees, covered in black cloth, on which the book of the Rights of Man lay shrouded in black crêpe while the nearby trees were decorated with the Lithuanian coat of arms and the White Eagle, emblem of the ancient Polish nation. Throughout the nineteenth century, too, other, private individuals included Rousseau’s island on their itineraries, sensitive and cultivated readers such as, for example, the young Englishwoman Caroline Stanley, who visited the Lac de Bienne in the summer of 1820 and painted this view of the Île Saint-Pierre — along with the Grindelwald glacier and other wonders of the Swiss landscape — in her watercolor album, which I came across recently in an antiquarian bookshop in Zurich.

A number of these visitors, too, carved their initials or the date of their visits with a penknife in the doorjambs and window seat of the Rousseau room, and as one runs a finger along these grooves in the wood, one wishes one could know who they were and what has become of them.

In the course of our own century, now nearing its end, this Rousseau mania has gradually abated. At any rate, in the few days I spent on the island — during which time I passed not a few hours sitting by the window in the Rousseau room — among the tourists who come over to the island on a day trip for a stroll or a bite to eat, only two strayed into this room with its sparse furnishings — a settee, a bed, a table, and a chair — and even those two, evidently disappointed at how little there was to see, soon left again. Not one of them bent down to look at the glass display case to try to decipher Rousseau’s handwriting, nor noticed the way that the bleached deal floorboards, almost two feet wide, are so worn down in the middle of the room as to form a shallow depression, nor that in places the knots in the wood protrude by almost an inch. No one ran a hand over the stone basin worn smooth by age in the antechamber, or noticed the smell of soot which still lingers in the fireplace, or paused to look out of the window with its view across the orchard and a meadow to the island’s southern shore. For me, though, as I sat in Rousseau’s room, it was as if I had been transported back to an earlier age, an illusion I could indulge in all the more readily inasmuch as the island still retained that same quality of silence, undisturbed by even the most distant sound of a motor vehicle, as was still to be found everywhere in the world a century or two ago. Toward evening, especially, when the day-trippers had returned home, the island was immersed in a stillness such as is scarcely now to be found anywhere in the orbit of our civilized world, and where nothing moved, save perhaps the leaves of the mighty poplars in the breezes which sometimes stirred along the edge of the lake. The paths strewn with a fine limestone gravel grew ever brighter as I walked along them in the gathering dusk, past fenced-in meadows, past a pale motionless field of oats, a vineyard, and a vintner’s hut, up to the terrace at the edge of the beech wood already black with night, from where I watched the lights go on one after another on the opposite shore. The darkness seemed to rise out of the lake, and for a moment as I stood there gazing down into it, an image arose in my mind which somewhat resembled a color plate in an old natural history book and which — though more precise and more attractive by far than any such colored print — revealed numerous fish of the lake as they hung sleeping in the deep currents between the dark walls of water, above and behind each other, larger and smaller ones, roach and rudd, bleaks and barbels, char and trout, dace and minnows, catfish, zander and pike and tench and graylings and crucian carp.

When Rousseau fled to the Île Saint-Pierre in the autumn of 1765, he was already on the verge of utter physical and mental exhaustion. Between 1751 and 1761, in his fifth decade and in ever more precarious health, he had, first in Paris and then in the Ermitage at Montmorency, committed to paper thousands upon thousands of pages. The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, which earned him the prize of the Académie de Dijon; the treatise On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men; the opera Le Devin du village; the letters on French music and on Providence, to Voltaire and to D’Alembert; the fairy tale La Reine fantasque; the novel La Nouvelle Héloïse; Émile and The Social Contract—all this and more was written during this period alongside the extremely copious correspondence which Rousseau always maintained. When one considers the extent and diversity of this creative output, one can only assume that Rousseau must have spent the entire time hunched over his desk in an attempt to capture, in endless sequences of lines and letters, the thoughts and feelings incessantly welling up within him. Scarcely had he reached the apogee of literary fame for his passionate epistolatory novel proclaiming the natural rights of lovers, than the state of nervous exhaustion resulting from this manic productivity was further exacerbated when Émile and The Social Contract were banned and confiscated by the parlement in Paris, thus making of the celebrated author an outcast, ostracized and banished from France on pain of arrest. Nor does Rousseau fare any better in his native city of Geneva. Here, too, he is condemned as a godless and seditious person, and his writings consigned to the flames. Looking back on this time when fate turned against him, Rousseau writes in 1770, at the beginning of the last book of his Confessions: “Here commences the work of darkness, in which, for eight years past, I have been entombed, without ever having been able, in spite of all my efforts, to penetrate its frightful obscurity. In the abyss of misfortune in which I am submerged, I feel the … blows which are directed against me. I perceive their immediate instrument, but I cannot see either the hand which guides them or the means which it employs. Shame and misfortune fall upon me as if of themselves, and unawares.” A temporary refuge is vouchsafed him only when he reaches Neuchâtel, a territory under Prussian rule and governed by Lord Marischal George Keith, where Rousseau’s admirer, Madame Boy de la Tour, places at his disposal a vacant farmhouse in Môtiers, in the remote Val de Travers. The first winter Rousseau passes there is one of the coldest of the century. The first snows fall in October. Despite his chronic abdominal complaints and the various other illnesses and ailments which plague him, from this inhospitable exile Rousseau defends himself as best he can against the incessant allegations which the Geneva Council and the clergy of Neuchâtel lay at his door. From time to time the darkness appears to lift a little. Rousseau pays calls on his protector, Lord Keith, whose ménage includes the Kalmuck Stéfan, the negro Motcho, Ibrahim the Tartar, and Ermentulla, a Muslim woman from Armenia. In this tolerant environment the persecuted philosopher, who at this period has already taken to wearing his infamous Armenian garb, a kind of kaftan and fur bonnet, appears not in the least incongruous. Moreover, he is at pains to accommodate himself with Georges de Montmollin, the pastor in Môtiers, going to mass and communion; he sits in front of the house in the sun occupying himself with the weaving of silk ribbons and goes botanizing along the valley and in the alpine pastures. “Il me semble,” he writes later in the Rêveries, “que sous les ombrages d’une forêt je suis oublié, libre et paisible comme si je n’avais plus d’ennemis.” The enemies, meanwhile, were not idle. Rousseau sees himself obliged to write a letter in his own defense to the Archbishop of Paris, and a year later the pamphlet Lettres de la montagne, in which he demonstrates how the Geneva Council’s proceedings against him offend against both the constitution of that Republic and its liberal traditions. Voltaire, orchestrating the campaign against Rousseau from behind the scenes in an unholy alliance with the self-righteous representatives of the classe vénérable, responded to this missive with a pamphlet entitled Le Sentiment des citoyens, in which, having failed to send Rousseau to the scaffold, he attempts to denounce him as a charlatan and a blasphemous liar. He does this not under his own name but anonymously, in the style of a fanatical Calvinist minister. Full of shame and sorrow — thus the pamphlet — one is forced to the conclusion that in Rousseau, one is dealing with a man who still bears the deadly marks of his debauchery, and in the costume of a traveling showman drags with him from town to town and mountaintop to mountaintop the wretched woman whose mother he sent to an early grave and whose children he abandoned at the door of the foundlings’ home, thereby not only forswearing any natural feeling but at the same time divesting himself of all honor and religion. It is not immediately clear why Voltaire, who in the course of his career did not otherwise notably distinguish himself as a defender of the true faith, should have taken up the cause against Rousseau with such vehemence, nor why he should have hounded him so relentlessly and with such venom. The only possible explanation seems to be that he was unable to come to terms with his own fame being eclipsed by the light of this new star in the literary firmament. Few things are as immutable as the vindictiveness with which writers talk about their literary colleagues behind their backs. But however such matters may have stood at the time, Voltaire’s public invective and his scheming behind the scenes finally resulted in Rousseau’s having to leave the Val de Travers. When the Marquise de Verdelin visited him in Môtiers in early September 1765 and attended a Sunday service there, Montmollin, who for a while at least had been favorably disposed toward Rousseau but had increasingly come under the influence of his colleagues from Neuchâtel and Geneva, delivered a sermon on the verse in Proverbs 15 which states that the participation of the wicked in the sacrifice of the Lord is an abomination. Not even the simplest soul among the faithful present that day in the church at Môtiers could have been in any doubt as to who this inflammatory sermon was aimed at. It is scarcely surprising, then, that henceforth whenever Rousseau appeared on the street he was sworn at and mobbed by the angry villagers, and that the same night, stones were hurled at the gallery and thrown through the windows of his house. Rousseau writes later, in the Confessions, that at the time in the Val de Travers he was treated like a rabid wolf and that, passing one of the scattered cottages, he would sometimes hear one of the peasants call out, “Fetch me my gun so that I can take a shot at him.”

Compared to these dark days, the Île Saint-Pierre must truly have appeared to Rousseau, when he arrived there on the ninth of September, as a paradise in miniature in which he might believe he could collect himself in a stillness, as he writes at the beginning of the fifth Promenade, interrupted only by the cry of the eagle, the song of an occasional bird, and the rushing of the mountain streams. During his stay on the island, Rousseau was provided for by the steward Gabriel Engel and his wife, Salome, who managed the farmstead with a few servants and were later reprimanded by the Berne Council for having unquestioningly taken in the refugee without further ado. Nonetheless, Rousseau was hardly as solitary on the island in September and October 1765 as the fifth Promenade would have us believe. As in Môtiers, here, too, he was subject to the attentions of a steady stream of visitors, from whom he frequently found himself obliged to escape via the trapdoor which is still to be seen in his room to this day. Nor were the months of the harvest, during which large numbers of people from Bienne and its surroundings were employed on the island, quite such a peaceful time as Rousseau might in retrospect have believed. Nevertheless we can easily understand how, after all he had had to endure in Môtiers, he could believe that he could easily spend two years, two centuries, or all of eternity on the island in the care of the Engels. That at least is almost exactly how I felt when, returning at dusk from my walk on the first evening of my stay, I sat alone in the dining room of the hotel. Outside, night had fallen, and inside I was lapped in the warm glow of a lamp and looked after most attentively by the patron himself, who came over to my table from time to time to see whether everything was in order and whether there was anything further I desired. This patron, one Herr Regli, who that evening was wearing an apricot-colored suit and appeared almost to glide through the rooms, seemed to me the very model of courtesy and consideration, and my admiration for him was complete when I later heard him say on the telephone, as he sat in his little office, yes, yes, of course he was still there, vous me connaissez, toujours fidèle au poste.

Nor was there any letup for Rousseau, during his stay on the island, in the daily business of writing, even if he claimed, in the fifth Promenade, to have sought to extricate himself from it by any means possible. Apart from his ceaseless correspondence, during these weeks he was occupied with the editing of his Projet de constitution pour la Corse, not published until almost one hundred years later, which he wrote down in two small notebooks today preserved in the Library of

Geneva. The casual remark Rousseau made in The Social Contract, that it was time that a wise man by means of a draft constitution showed the Corsican people — then engaged in their struggle for independence from Genoese rule — how they might set about legislating their affairs of state, had led Captain Mathieu Buttafuoco to pay a visit to Môtiers to ask the philosopher to take this role upon himself. There was in Europe at the time a great deal of support for the Corsicans’ protest against foreign rule, and the Corsican general Pascal Paoli, the father of the fatherland, represented a lodestar for all those who longed to see a better regime. We encounter him in Hölderlin as well as in Hebel’s Alemannic poems, in which a beggar sitting by the side of the road relates: “I ha in schwarzer Wetternacht / vor Laudons Zelt und Fahne gwacht / I bi bim Paschal Paoli / in Korsika Draguner gsi” [“In darkest night, in deepest dark / I watched by Laudon’s tent and flag / I served with Pascal Paoli / with Corsican dragoons did I”]. In Rousseau’s imagination, too, the idea of Corsica takes on legendary traits from the beginning; he believed he had a premonition that “un jour cette petite île étonnera l’Europe,” even if he could not have known in what terrifying manner this prophecy was to be fulfilled within the next fifty years. He saw in Corsica the potential for putting into practice an order in which the evils of the society in which he felt himself trapped could be avoided. His aversion to urban civilization motivated him to suggest the Corsicans adopt agriculture as the only possible basis for a truly good and free life. All forms of hierarchy were to be avoided by means of a legal system administered through rural communities and based on the principle of equality, as in the cantons of central Switzerland. Above and beyond this, Rousseau went so far as to recommend (at the time when Pascal Paoli was busy establishing his own mint in Corte) that the Corsicans abolish monetary economy in favor of a system of bartering. The whole Corsica project outlined on the Île Saint-Pierre is thus a utopian dream in which bourgeois society, increasingly determined by the manufacture of goods and the accumulation of private wealth, is promised a return to more innocent times. Neither Rousseau nor those who came after him were ever able to resolve the inherent contradiction between this nostalgic utopia and the inexorable march of progress toward the brink of the abyss. The gap between our longings and our rational strategy for living is clearly illustrated by the fact that Rousseau, who at that time needed nothing more urgently than a safe haven, could not bring himself to move to Corsica. For all that the Gazette de Berne had already announced that he would be taking up the position of Governor on the Mediterranean island, if truth be told, having acquired his reputation in the salons of the eminent society of the day, he had no inclination to return to what, from his perspective, appeared as a precivilized world, in which, as he notes in the Confessions, the most basic comforts would be lacking. He is positively horrified at the prospect of crossing the Alps and having to transport with him his entire household effects—“linge, habits, vaisselle, batterie de cuisine, papier, livres,” he writes, “il fallait tout porter avec soi.” The place where he had been offered accommodation and a living was Vescovato, a small town huddled high up on one of the steep east-facing slopes of the Castagniccia. In the eighteenth century it was a place of some importance, and the Filippini house which would have been at his disposal was by no means as primitive as perhaps he feared. I visited it a few months after I had been to the Île Saint-Pierre. From the first-floor windows one looks down into a steep gorge, which even at the end of summer is alive with the sound of water. Farther away, one perceives a shimmering blue haze in which it is impossible to distinguish the sea from the sky rising above it. The town is surrounded by cultivated terraces, abandoned now, but in which at that time fruit trees flourished, oranges and apricots and various fruits of the field. In the surrounding area, covering the slopes of the hills, were groves of sweet chestnuts in whose dappled shade Rousseau could have taken the air with his dog at his side. Who can say whether, if he had spent the rest of his life there, far removed from the hubbub of literary business and hypocrisy, he might yet have retained that sense of sanity and proportion which later at times threatened to desert him altogether.

Although Rousseau was by no means idle as an author in the few weeks he spent on the Île Saint-Pierre, in retrospect he nonetheless came to see this time as an attempt to free himself from the exigencies of literary production. He talks of how he longs now for something other than literary renown, the scent of which, as he says, revolted him from the very moment he first got a whiff of it. The dégoût Rousseau now felt with regard to literature was not merely an intermittent emotional reaction but something that for him always went hand in hand with the act of writing. In accordance with his doctrine of the formerly unspoiled state of Nature, he saw the man who reflects as a depraved animal perverted from its natural state, and reflection as a degraded form of mental energy. No one, in the era when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming, with enormous philosophical and literary effort, its entitlement to emancipation, recognized the pathological aspect of thought as acutely as Rousseau, who himself wished for nothing more than to be able to halt the wheels ceaselessly turning within his head. If he nevertheless persevered with writing, then only, as Jean Starobinski notes, in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable. The copying out of musical notation, which Rousseau was constrained to undertake in his earlier years and at the last in Paris, was for him one of the few means of keeping at bay the thoughts constantly brewing in his head like storm clouds. How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill is shown by Rousseau’s description of his apparently so happy days on the island in the Lac de Bienne. He has, as he writes in the fifth Promenade, deliberately forsworn the burden of work, and his greatest joy has been to leave his books safely shut away and to have neither ink nor paper to hand. However, since the leisure time thus freed up must be put to some use, Rousseau devotes himself to the study of botany, whose basic principles he had acquired in Môtiers on excursions with Jean Antoine d’Ivernois. “I set out to compose,” writes Rousseau in the fifth Promenade, “a Flora Petrinsularis and to describe every single plant on the island in enough detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days. They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon peel; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks — and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description. In accordance with this noble plan, every morning after breakfast I would set out with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systemae Naturae under my arm to study one particular section of the island, which I had divided for this purpose into small squares, intending to visit them all one after another in every season.” The central motif of this passage is not so much the impartial insight into the indigenous plants of the island as that of ordering, classification, and the creation of a perfect system. Thus this apparently innocent occupation — the deliberate resolve no longer to think and merely to look at nature — becomes, for the writer plagued by the chronic need to think and work, a demanding rationalistic project involving the compiling of lists, indices, and catalogs, along with the precise description of, for example, the long stamens of self-heal, the springiness of those of nettle and of wall-pellitory, and the sudden bursting of the seed capsules of balsam and of beech. Nonetheless, the leaves of the small herbaria which Rousseau later compiled for

Madelon and Julie de la Tour and other young ladies take on the aspect of an innocent bricolage in comparison with the self-destructive business of writing to which he usually submitted himself. A faint aura of unconscious beauty still hovers over these flower collections, in which lichens, sprigs of veronica, lilies of the valley, and autumn crocuses have survived, pressed and a little faded, from the eighteenth century. They can still be admired today in the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The herbarium Rousseau compiled for himself, meanwhile — eleven quarto volumes — was, up to the Second World War, preserved in the Botanical Museum in Berlin, until, like so much and so many in that city, it went up in flames one night during one of the nocturnal bombing raids.

Rousseau is only able to experience the true contrast to the employment which even botanizing represents when, on fine days, he rows far out on the calm waters of the lake. “There, stretching out full length in the boat,” we read in the chapter on the island, “and turning my eyes skyward, I let myself float and drift wherever the water took me, often for several hours on end.” The clarity of the sky arching over him out there on the lake is reminiscent of the description of the mountains of the Valais at the beginning of La Nouvelle Héloïse as a landscape freed from the veils of lower, denser atmosphere, which has something of a magical, transcendental quality about it and in which one forgets everything, even oneself, and no longer knows where one is. “The moment of utmost clarity of the landscape,” writes Jean Starobinski, who has studied the theme of transparency in Rousseau, “is at one and the same time the moment at which individual existence dissolves at its limits and is dreamily transformed into thin air.” To become totally transparent was, according to Starobinski, the greatest ambition of the inventor of modern autobiography. The symbol of this ambition is the crystal, for it is impossible to tell, Starobinski states, whether it is “a body in its purest state or, by contrast, a petrified soul.” Starobinski points out in this context, poised between alchemy and metaphysics, that Rousseau, in his Institutions chimiques, devotes a great deal of attention to the process of vitrification, quoting a passage in which Rousseau discusses the author of a volume published in 1669 entitled Physica subterranea, one Johann Joachim Becher, who derives his vitreous earth not merely from the realm of minerals but also from the ashes of plants and animals. “He assures us,” Rousseau writes of Becher, “that they contain an easily fusible, vitrifiable earth from which it is possible to make vases superior to the finest porcelain. Using procedures that he keeps shrouded in much mystery, he has carried out experiments that have convinced him that man, like all animals, is glass and can return to glass. This leads him to the most entertaining reflections on the trouble the ancients took to burn or embalm the dead, and on ways in which one might preserve the ashes of one’s ancestors by means of a few hours’ work, replacing hideous and disgusting cadavers with clean, shining vases of beautiful, transparent glass, tinted not with the characteristic green of glass made from plants but with a milky white color heightened by a slight tinge of narcissus.” This conjecture about the metamorphosis of the body into a pure substance, as it were freed from the ephemerality of existence — which Rousseau might well have seen as a metaphor for true artistic production — is, as Starobinski writes, in the final phase of his thought transformed into its “negative counterpart: pulverization, which kills the light and reduces human society to a dark, indistinguishable and impenetrable mass. No exchange is possible between opposites; Jean-Jacques’ transparency is solidified, the dark night outside him congealed. The veil, too, has changed: no longer thin and fluttering, it has descended to enclose the world it once concealed in a web of darkness.”

A dozen years filled with fear and panic await Rousseau after his departure from the Île Saint-Pierre on the twenty-fifth of October. He spends a few days in Bienne, which is under the jurisdiction of the Prince Bishop of Basel and where some of the citizens hope to be able to secure him the right to remain, at least for the winter. He spends the first night in the Croix Blanche and then finds quarters with Masel, a wigmaker of ill repute, in a room overlooking a stinking tanning pit. Nor are the other signs any more auspicious. Influenced by Berne, which in reality calls the tune in Bienne, several members of the Magistrat [municipal council] declare themselves opposed to offering asylum to the stateless refugee. On the twenty-ninth, therefore, Rousseau moves on again. From Basel he writes to Thérèse La Vasseur, the woman who has looked after him for twenty years and the mother of his five long-lost children, saying he is feverish, with a sore throat and sick at heart. His sole consolation is his dog Sultan, who has run for thirty miles ahead of the carriage like a courier and who now, Rousseau continues, “is lying asleep on my coat under the table as I write.” On the thirty-first of October, Rousseau leaves Basel, and Switzerland—“cette terre homicide,” as he says on the last page of his autobiography — for good. He is now resolved to take up the offer of asylum in England. The passport issued to him allows him to travel through France, breaking the journey at Strasbourg and Paris, where the world and his wife come to marvel at him and such Rousseau hysteria prevails that David Hume, who has made use of his ambassadorial influence to intercede in England on Rousseau’s behalf, writes to Hugh Blair that he would venture to raise by subscription the sum of £50,000 (an enormous sum in those days) in the French capital in under two weeks, if only Rousseau would allow it. He is such an object of fascination in society (writes Hume) that his housekeeper, La Vasseur, who after all is merely an uneducated woman, is more talked about than the Princess of Monaco or the Countess Egmont. “His very dog, who is no better than a coly,” Hume adds, “has a name and reputation in the world.” At the beginning of January 1766, Rousseau travels to England. There, alone in a foreign country, he is increasingly at the mercy of the latent paranoia to which he has always been prone and which, in exile, has become acute. His mood oscillates between despondency and exhilaration. A certain J. Craddock relates in his Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs, published in London in 1828, that Rousseau, despite knowing scarcely any English, on a visit to a theatrical production to which he was invited by Garrick was so overcome with weeping at the tragedy performed that evening, and so transported with laughter at the comedy which followed, that he was quite beside himself, “and that Mrs. Garrick had to hold the skirt of his caftan to prevent his falling out of the box.” Hume had the opportunity to observe these mood swings for himself when Rousseau came to confide in him about his suspicions and walked darkly up and down in his room for an hour without saying a word, only then suddenly to sit upon his lap, cover his face with kisses and assure him, with tears in his eyes, of his eternal friendship and gratitude. After this it was not long until he came to see Hume, too, as one of the most insidious among the conspirators plotting to deprive him of both his honor and his livelihood. The silent exchange of glances, which in La Nouvelle Héloïse indicate the harmony of souls, he now perceives as a threat. Constantly impelled by his fear in a hostile environment to investigate the slightest nuance, any minute irregularity he discovers in the behavior of a given interlocutor is taken as evidence that the latter is involved in the conspiracy being plotted against him. “For Jean-Jacques,” Jean Starobinski writes, “to live amid persecution is to feel caught in a web of interlocking signs.” Every now and then the states of anxiety abate a little. In Wootton in Derbyshire, where he found refuge in a country house belonging to Richard Davenport, a noble elderly gentleman whose acquaintance he had made at a social gathering in London, he enjoyed a brief period of respite, taking up his botanical studies again and writing some of the most lyrical pages of his Confessions. However — not least because Davenport himself was not present in the house to intervene in the misunderstandings which flared up here too — once again everything soon turned sour. Thérèse fell out with the servants, who did not take kindly to being ordered about by this upstart Frenchwoman, and things came to a head in the spring when Davenport’s housekeeper set down before the two guests a soup strewn with cinders and ash. Rousseau grows more and more convinced that his every action, and every change in his circumstances, through no fault of his own gives rise to consequences and chains of events beyond his control, making him a prisoner of his enemies conspiring everywhere against him. After leaving Wootton at the beginning of May 1767 in order to return to France, he writes from Spalding in Lincolnshire — a godforsaken place set among endless fields of cabbage and beet — to Lord Chancellor Camden, asking him to place an escort at his disposal so that he may be sure of reaching Dover safely and without undue delay. For three years after his return to France, Rousseau lives with Thérèse — often under an assumed name — in remote country seats of the nobility such as Château Trye in Normandy, or in small towns like Bourgoin or Monquin far away in the South, always with the shadow of outlawry hanging over him. When, in 1770, on condition of not publishing anything on political or religious questions, he receives permission to reside in the capital, attempting to eke out a living there by copying out sheet music, the morbid universe surrounding him can no longer be dispelled. “The children’s grimaces,” Starobinski writes, “the price of peas in Les Halles, the small shops in the rue Plâtrière — all appeared to be evidence of the same conspiracy.” This notwithstanding, Rousseau does still succeed in accomplishing a considerable amount. He finishes the Confessions and reads from them in various salons in sessions lasting up to seventeen (!) hours, to some extent anticipating Franz Kafka’s desire to be allowed to read aloud, to an audience condemned to listen, the whole of Stendhal’s Éducation sentimentale at one sitting. There follow a few more treatises, on botany and on the government of Poland, as well as the so-called Dialogues, in which Rousseau appears as the judge of Jean-Jacques. In his last two years while out walking he makes notes, on playing cards, for the

Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, which he completes in April 1780. After that he leaves Paris and moves into a small house in the park at Ermenonville which the Marquis de Girardin has placed at his disposal. He lives there for five more weeks in early summer. He rises at dawn, goes for walks, leaning on his cane, in the beautiful surroundings,

collects leaves and flowers, and sometimes takes a boat out onto the lake. On the second of July — he is sixty-six years old — he comes back from one of his walks with a terrible headache. Thérèse helps him into a chair. Felled by a stroke, he collapses onto the floor and, after a few convulsions, dies. Two days later he is buried at Ermenonville on the Isle of Poplars. In the years that follow, the Marquis transforms his estate into a parc du souvenir. He has a classical monument erected, the Swiss chalet is completed, a Temple of

Philosophy is constructed with an altar dedicated to reverie. Even the cabin in front of which Rousseau would often sit on a bench, gazing out over the peaceful landscape, is carefully preserved. The park has become a site of pilgrimage, and more than one lady sinks down before the grave on the island, pressing her bosom against the cold stone beneath which Rousseau’s earthly remains rest, until, that is, on the ninth of October 1794 they are transferred to the Panthéon. On this memorable day, a group of musicians performed excerpts from the opera Le Devin du village; the oak coffin, triple-lined with lead and further clad with an outer lead covering, was raised from the earth and taken to Paris in a grand and solemn cortège. In all the villages along the route the people lined the streets calling “Vive la République! Vive la mémoire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau!” On the evening of the tenth of October the procession arrived at the Tuileries, where a huge crowd was waiting with flaming torches. The coffin, covered by a wooden framework painted

with the symbols of the Revolution, was placed on a bier surrounded by a semicircle of willows. The main part of the ceremony took place the following morning, when the funeral procession continued on its way to the Panthéon, led by a captain of the United States Navy bearing the banner of the stars and stripes and followed by two standard-bearers carrying the tricolore and the colors of the Republic of Geneva.