He then strikes home with a parable. The Abbé Pâris had died in the odour of Jansenist sanctity (1727), and extraordinary doings went on at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were made whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant of the Rue St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, "My lord, I know that you neither believe in the beatitude of St. Jean de Pâris, nor in the miracles which God has been pleased publicly to work upon his tomb in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous city in the world; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just seen the saint in person raised from the dead in the spot where his bones were laid." The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail of such a circumstance that could strike a beholder. "I am persuaded that on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating him who testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, his confessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from his speech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when having no confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion that he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are a convulsionary, and have seen Saint Pâris resuscitated. There is nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many other wonders!" The man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally by a number of other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of sound sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some would send the man to Bedlam, "but you after a grave reprimand, will be content with saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of sound sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not know how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist. Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: I give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any other sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order and purely supernatural."[132]
Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers at his gates. "If I had declared for atheism," he says bitterly, "they would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in peace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high favour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and I should have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would not have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken the trouble to assure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway, an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle. Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their importunity, nor to feel with gratitude that they are obeying a call to lay me in my very grave with weariness."[133]
He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known. It was at Neuchâtel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended, magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick promulgated his famous bull:—"Let the parsons who make for themselves a cruel and barbarous God, be eternally damned as they desire and deserve; and let those parsons who conceive God gentle and merciful, enjoy the plenitude of his mercy."[134] When Rousseau came within the territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris, Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of the less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not, without failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect the public profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight years before, attended the religious services with regularity. He even wrote to the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and protesting the sincerity of his union with the reformed congregation.[135] The result of this was that the pastor came to tell him how great an honour he held it to count such a member in his flock, and how willing he was to admit him without further examination to partake of the communion.[136] Rousseau went to the ceremony with eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may respect his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly more edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite, merely to harass a priest and fill a bishop with fury.
In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years of his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he calls the inactive chattering of the parlour—people sitting in front of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the tongue—he learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow about with him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the village, and chatting with the passers-by. He made presents of his work to young women about to marry, always on the condition that they should suckle their children when they came to have them. If a little whimsical, it was a harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter to think of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of noblemen making it the business of their lives to run after ribands. A society clothed in breeches was incensed about the same time by Rousseau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest, the furred bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There was nothing very wonderful in this departure from use. An Armenian tailor used often to visit some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him, and reflected that such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the circumstances of his bodily disorder.[137] Here was a solid practical reason for what has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain. Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham had for coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do with Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like the Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so. We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it was so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would be very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities of this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about unknowable trifles.
During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own. Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments, came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending people to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. "I had never been free from strangers for six weeks," he writes. "Two days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese, recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill again, and he has only just gone away."[138] One visitor, writing home to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage, describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch us with surprise:—"Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what true politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like of which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes an interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats and jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper."[139] He was not so civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with a word of most sardonic roughness.[140] But he could also be very generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happens rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment, nor to exact it."[141] He received hundreds of letters, some seeking an application of his views on education to a special case, others craving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he had been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage of letters, which after all contained little more than reproaches, insults, menaces, imbecilities.[142]
Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with the Prince of Würtemberg, then living near Lausanne.[143] The prince had a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her upbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please to direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to direct the education of princes or princesses.[144] His undaunted correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the fondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested, and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and admonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal, but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple and methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond of his wife,—all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves a place among the ample mass of other evidence of the power which Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, close and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places. But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one, and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince sent multitudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless with their details of the nursery, may well have become a little tedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.[145] The famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who could have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.[146] People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends whose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of glory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks.
It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and Boswell in the list of the multitudes with whom he had to do at this time.[147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him that his father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of an obscure Swiss pastor. He had just "yielded to his fate, sighed as a lover, and obeyed as a son." "How sorry I am for our poor Mademoiselle Curchod," writes Moultou to Rousseau; "Gibbon whom she loves, and to whom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has come to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old passion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter that makes my heart ache." He then entreats Rousseau to use his influence with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extolling to him the lady's worth and understanding.[148] "I hope Mr. Gibbon will not come," replied the sage; "his coldness makes me think ill of him. I have been looking over his book again [the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either."[149] Whether Gibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had been said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that this extraordinary man should have been less precipitate in condemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger.[150]
Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson "rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner" on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord Marischal, and here his indomitable passion for making the personal acquaintance of any one who was much talked about, naturally led him to seek so singular a character as the man who was now at Motiers. What Rousseau thought of one who was as singular a character as himself in another direction, we do not know.[151] Lord Marischal warned Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full of visionary ideas, even having seen spirits—a serious proof of unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of Frederick's court at Berlin. "I only hope," says the sage Scot, of the Scot who was not sage, "that he may not fall into the hands of people who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception you gave him."[152] As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell to a place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously. Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this is the proper place for us very briefly to speak.
The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to assert their independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which had begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli (1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the government of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said, "There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and that is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this brave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty, entitle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach them how to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle will one day astonish Europe,"[153]—a presentiment that in a sense came true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on the little island seven years later than the publication of this passage. Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August 1764, Buttafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for the purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political institutions and a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in the application of ideal systems, and we are assured that he had no intention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of inducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a history of their exploits.[154] Rousseau, however, did not understand the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very idea of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he entered into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself with Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and opinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would produce a set of institutions that should be fit for a free and valorous people.[155] In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768), and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long day afterwards. "Mind your own affairs," at length cried Johnson sternly to him, "and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would empty your head of Corsica."[156] At the end of 1765, the immortal hero-worshipper on his return expected to come upon his hero at Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter in wonderful French. "You will forget all your cares for many an evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepest obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has done me marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if you, illustrious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they have acquired with so much heroism—if you have cooled towards these gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can say."[157]
Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of Rousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents with which we certainly need not concern ourselves.[158] Next, a very real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the assistance of the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)—an iniquitous transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to justice, humanity, reason, and policy.[159] Civilisation would have been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a state.[160]