CHAPTER IV
ROUSSEAU—BEAUMARCHAIS—BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE—ANDRÉ CHÉNIER
I
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU the man is inseparable from Rousseau the writer; his works proceed directly from his character and his life. Born at Geneva in 1712, he died at Ermenonville in 1778. His childhood was followed by years of vagabondage. From 1732, the date of his third residence with Madame de Warens, until 1741, though his vagabondage did not wholly cease, he was collecting his powers and educating his mind with studies ardently pursued. During nine subsequent years in Paris, in Venice, and elsewhere, he was working his way towards the light; it was the period of his gayer writings, ballet, opera, comedy, and of the articles on music contributed to the Encyclopédie: he had not yet begun to preach and prophesy to his age. The great fourth period of his life, from 1749 to 1762, includes all his masterpieces except the Confessions. From 1762 until his death, while his temper grew darker and his reason was disturbed, Rousseau was occupied with apologetic and autobiographic writings.
His mother died in giving birth to Jean-Jacques. His father, a watchmaker, filled the child's head with the follies of romances, which they read together, and gave him through Plutarch's Lives a sense of the exaltations of virtue. The boy's feeling for nature was quickened and fostered in the garden of the pastor of Bossey. From a notary's office, where he seemed an incapable fool, he passed under the harsh rule of an engraver of watches, learning the vices that grow from fear. At sixteen he fled, and found protection at Annecy, under Madame de Warens, a young and comely lady, recently converted to the Roman communion, frank, kind, gay, and as devoid of moral principles as any creature in the Natural History. Sent to Turin for instruction, Rousseau renounced his Protestant faith, and soon after found in the good Abbé Gaime the model in part of his Savoyard vicar. Some experience of domestic service was followed by a year at Annecy, during which Rousseau's talent as a musician was developed. From eighteen to twenty he led a wandering life—"starved, feasted, despaired, was happy." Rejoining Madame de Warens at Chambéry in 1732, he interested himself in music, physics, botany, and was more and more drawn towards the study of letters. He methodised his reading (1738-41), and passionately pursued a liberal system of self-education, literary, scientific, and philosophical.
Rousseau's relations with his bonne maman, Madame de Warens, had been troubled by the latest of her other loves. In 1741 he set off for Paris, bearing with him the manuscript of a new system of musical notation, which was offered to the Académie des Sciences, and was declared neither new nor useful for instrumentalists. An experiment in life as secretary to the French Ambassador at Venice closed, after fourteen months, with his abrupt dismissal. Again in Paris, Rousseau obtained celebrity by his operas and comedies, was received in the salons, and associated joyously with Diderot, Marmontel, and Grimm. He arranged his domestic life by taking an illiterate and vulgar drudge, Thérèse Le Vasseur, for his companion; their children were abandoned to the care of the Foundling Hospital.
In 1749 Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes. Rousseau, on the road to visit his friend, read in the Mercure de France that the Academy of Dijon had proposed as the subject for a prize to be awarded next year the question, "Has the progress of arts and sciences contributed to purify morals?" Suddenly a tumult of ideas arose in his brain and overwhelmed him; it was an ecstasy of the intellect and the passions. With Diderot's encouragement he undertook his indictment of civilisation; in 1750 the Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts was crowned. In accordance with his theory he proceeded to simplify his own life, intensifying his self-consciousness by singularities of assumed austerity, and playing the part (not wholly a fictitious one) of a moral reformer. Famous as author of the Discours and the opera Le Devin de Village, presented before the King, he returned to his native Switzerland, and there re-entered the Protestant communion. In 1754 he again competed for a prize at Dijon, on the question, "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by the law of nature?" Rousseau failed to obtain the prize, but the Discours sur l'Inégalité was published (1755) with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva. He had discovered in private property the source of all the evils of society.
In Switzerland Rousseau prepared a first redaction of his political treatise, the Contrat Social, and filled his heart with the beauty of those prospects which form an environment for the lovers in his Héloïse. In 1756 he was established, through the kindness of Madame d'Épinay, in the Hermitage, near the borders of the forest of Montmorency. His delight in the woods and fields was great; his delight in Madame d'Houdetot, kinswoman of his hostess, was a more troubled passion. Quarrels with Madame d'Épinay, quarrels with Grimm and Diderot, estrangement from Madame d'Houdetot, closed the scene at the Hermitage.
Authorship, however, had its joys and consolations. The Lettre à D'Alembert, a censure of the theatre (1758), was succeeded by La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), by the Contrat Social (1762), and Émile (1762). The days at Montmorency which followed his departure from the Hermitage passed in calm. With the publication of Émile the storms began again. The book, condemned by the Sorbonne, was ordered by the Parliament to be burnt by the common executioner. Rousseau escaped imprisonment by flight. In Switzerland he could not settle near Voltaire. A champion for the doctrine of a providential order of the world, an enemy of the stage—especially in republican Geneva—Rousseau had flung indignant words against Voltaire, and Voltaire had tossed back words of bitter scorn. Geneva had followed Paris in its hostility towards Rousseau's recent publications; whose doing could it be except Voltaire's? He fled from his persecutors to Môtiers, where the King of Prussia's governor afforded him protection. Renewed quarrels with his countrymen, clerical intolerance, mob violence, an envenomed pamphlet from Voltaire, once more drove him forth. He took refuge on an island in the lake of Bienne, only to be expelled by the authorities of Berne. Encouraged by Hume—"le bon David"—he arrived in January 1766 in London.