and interpreting it into an encomium on the great metaphysical poet of antiquity, he regained his tranquillity. He had a tender heart, but though he possessed some genius, he had not understanding enough to serve as an equilibrium. Rousseau was in very bad hands as regarded the gouverneuses, as he called them. The mother of Theresa was a grasping, artful, gossiping, selfish old woman. Rousseau was poor; she complained to his friends, and Diderot and Grimm thought it right to make her a small allowance. They did this unknown to their friend, and were certainly wrong; for there is nothing more improper than to interfere secretly with the household of others. Giving this money, they thought they had a right to interfere further. The le Vasseurs, mother and daughter, had no desire to pass the winter, away from their Parisian acquaintance, in the forest of Montmorenci. They complained bitterly, and Diderot wrote to remonstrate with Rousseau. To read his letter, you would imagine that his friend thought of wintering at the North Pole; his earnestness on stilts on such a petty occasion ought to have excited a smile; it gave birth to a storm in the breast of the sensitive philosopher—this was at last appeased—but still the thunder growled. The unfortunate passion of Rousseau for madame d'Houdetot at first made him solitary and abstracted—then miserable. Every demonstration of suffering was interpreted as springing from melancholy engendered by solitude.
His other friend, Grimm, was German, who had appeared in Paris in an obscure situation, as tutor to the children of the count de Schomberg. Rousseau was one of his first acquaintance; their common love of music brought them together. Grimm was a man of ambition as far as society went. His personal affectations did not stop at brushing his nails,—a mark of effeminacy indignantly related by Rousseau,—but by painting his cheeks white and red, which gained for him the nickname of Tyran le Blanc. Rousseau introduced him to madame d'Epinay. This lady was suffering bitterly from the infidelity of her lover Franceuil;—she permitted herself to be consoled by Grimm; who, while he became l'ami de maison, seems to have determined that he should be single in that character. He did all he could to undermine Rousseau with madame d'Epinay, inducing her to resent his faults, his sensitiveness, his imperious calls for sympathy and service, which she had hitherto regarded with affectionate indulgence. She was slow to submit to the law, and placed him in the Hermitage against Grimm's will;—to eject him from this abode was the aim of his false friend.
Of course, there are a thousand contradictions in the various accounts given of these quarrels; and we seek the truth rather from the letters written at the time, if these be not falsified. Grimm accused Rousseau of being in love with madame d'Epinay: he denies this; and at least, when he loved madame d'Houdetot, he no longer cared for her sister-in-law. Was she piqued by his coldness, as Rousseau insinuates; or was it merely that she yielded more and more to Grimm's representations that he was a dangerous person? The final cause of her quarrel, as she relates, was his speaking of her detractingly to Diderot, who refused to be acquainted with her. There seems some foundation for this accusation. She accuses him of speaking falsely; and there are certainly traces of his having spoken unreservedly. This was inexcusable, admitted as he was familiarly, and covered with benefits and kindness;—especially to one to whom she was a stranger. Grimm pushed things to extremities: he kept madame d'Epinay firm in her resentment; he embittered Diderot's feelings. The latter acted with his usual exaggerated and absurd sentimentality. Madame d'Epinay was very ill, and resolved on going to Geneva to consult the famous Tronchin. Diderot wrote a violent letter to Rousseau, insisting on his accompanying her, and saying, that, if his health did not allow him to bear the motion of a carriage, he ought to take his staff and follow her on foot. There is no trace that madame d'Epinay wished him to accompany her; on the contrary, she was doing all she could to throw him off. Rousseau felt himself outraged by this letter—he fell into a transport of rage—he complained to every body, and took the resolution of quitting the Hermitage. When it came to the point, winter setting in, he found this inconvenient; and wrote to madame d'Epinay, then at Geneva, to mention his intention of staying till spring. In her answer, she very decidedly tells him that he ought not to delay his departure so long. Why this abrupt and rude dismissal? Did it spring from Grimm's advice; or did she really feel resentment arising from the knowledge that he had either traduced her, or revealed her secrets to Diderot? On careful examination, we own, we incline to the latter opinion, and cannot exculpate Rousseau.
What a pitiful and wretched picture of society does all this present! People of refinement, of education, and genius,—Rousseau, a man so richly gifted with talent—Diderot, enthusiastic on the subject of every social duty—Grimm, a man of sense—madame d'Epinay, a woman of talent, whose disposition was injured by the state and opinions of society, but who was naturally generous, confiding, and friendly,—yet each and all acting with intolerance and bitterness. The passions were the sources of these dissensions,—Rousseau's for madame d'Houdetot—Grimm's for madame d'Epinay;—but why should not these feelings have inspired toleration and kindness? They were fostered unfortunately by temper and vanity. Each had microscopic eyes for the faults of the other—neither could perceive his own. Had they at once dismissed their mutual cavillings, reproaches, and explanations, and gone their own way in silence and toleration, they might have been unhappy,—for such must be the result of illicit love,—but they had not presented to all the world, and to posterity, so humbling a proof of the worthlessness of talent in directing the common concerns of life.
Rousseau, of course, at once quitted the Hermitage. He had a horror of entering Paris: he was greatly embarrassed as to where to go, when M. Mathas, procureur-fiscal to the prince of Condé, hearing of his uncomfortable situation, offered him a small house in his garden of Mont Louis, at Montmorenci: he accepted it at once, and removed thither. But his soul was still in tumults; still passion convulsed his heart, which would not be at peace. He desired to establish a friendship between himself, St. Lambert, and madame d'Houdetot; but they drew back—from the alleged motive that "Rousseau's attachment was the talk of Paris, and that therefore she could not have any intercourse with him." It was likely enough that the old woman, le Vasseur, or twenty others, might have been the cause of this gossip; but Rousseau chose to fix the blame on Diderot, and to quarrel with him outright. Strange that these sensitive men should have so little real affection in their nature that, for the sake of personal offences, real or imagined, they could at once throw off those whom they had loved, as they pretended, so well and so long; showing how much more deeply rooted and engrossing was self, than the interests and intercourse of their friends. A few years after, Diderot sought to be reconciled to his former friend; he engaged a mutual acquaintance to mediate between them. Rousseau declined his advances. He replied:—"I do not see what M. Diderot, after seven years' silence, all at once demands of me. I ask nothing of him—I have no disavowal to make. I am far from wishing him ill—and am yet further from doing or saying aught to injure him. I know how to respect the ties of an even extinguished friendship to the end; but I never renew it—that is my inviolable maxim." Rousseau was in exile and misfortune when Diderot made this advance, which was honourable to him; he was doubtless piqued by the refusal; but we cannot excuse him when, many years afterwards, after the death of his friend, he attacked him in one of his works. It would have been better to forget. And gladly would we, in spite of the publicity given, have passed over these details—but that they formed an intrinsic portion of the picture of Rousseau's life; and were the cause why, in after times, he became suspicious even to madness—miserable even to death.
1758.
Ætat.
46.
With the new year, Rousseau, quitting the Hermitage, began a new life; as much as an entire casting away of old friends, and seeking fresh ones, can change the tenor of existence. But Rousseau was ever the same. His passions, masked even to himself by their intensity, ruled his destiny; and it was a miserable one. The semblance of tranquillity, however, awaited him at first; and he gave himself to study and authorship uninterruptedly. The "Encyclopædia" undertaken by d'Alembert and Diderot engaged the attention of the literary world: it was made the vehicle of their opinions, and the engine for propagating them. Voltaire was residing at the Délices. He was disgusted by the pedantic, austere, puritanic tone of society at Geneva: he considered the drama as an admirable means of enlightening and refining a people; and, in concert with him, D'Alembert, in his article on "Geneva," wrote in favour of the establishment of a theatre in that city, where hitherto it had been forbidden. Rousseau, in his dreams of primitive innocence, considered this as an innovation on the simple manners of his country-people; and he took up his pen in opposition. He wrote with fervour and eloquence: he detailed the miseries resulting from a sophisticated state of society; and argued that the drama, by treating concerning, nourished the passions, and weakened the principles of morality. In the state in which society was in Paris, he had many arguments in his favour; and he might well consider the introduction of libertinism and luxury as pernicious, contrasted even with the narrow, bigoted spirit reigning at Geneva. The eloquence of his letter gave it vogue. In a note appended, he announced his rupture with Diderot,—accusing him at the same time of betraying him. This was fairly regarded as an unwarrantable attack, though he imagined it to be an act of heroism. It was an error, to make the public a confidant in their quarrel; and the doing so arose from the belief that all the world was occupied with him: but it was worse publicly to accuse a former friend.
Rousseau does his best, in the "Confessions," to show how contented and happy he was in his new abode—the number of friends he still retained—and his delight at being still at a distance from Paris. He, with proper pride, boasts of his contempt for party spirit, and the formation of cabals in literature, in which Paris was rife. Nothing debases literary men more than owning dependence, for praise or blame, on aught but the public at large.
Not far from his abode of Mont Louis was the chateau of Montmorenci, where the marshal duke de Luxembourg, with his family, usually passed the summer. On their first visit after his arrival, they seem courteous messages and invitations; but Rousseau, with proper pride, shunned advances, the nature of which he did not fully comprehend. This occasioned further demonstrations. The duke visited him—he became an habitual guest at the château—rooms were furnished for him in a sort of pleasure-house, or smaller château, in the grounds—and he was treated by the whole family with all that cordial and winning grace peculiar to French persons of rank in those days. He read the "Nouvelle Heloïse" and "Emile" to the duchess, who paid him the most flattering attentions. Both she and her husband displayed warm interest in his fortunes; and the noble, amiable character of the marshal was a pledge that such would prove neither treacherous nor evanescent. They were serviceable, without impertinent interference—kind, without pretension.
This may be considered a happy period in Rousseau's life. The works on which his fame is chiefly founded were finished or composed during these years. The "Nouvelle Heloïse" was published at the end of 1760. With all its errors, this novel is full of noble sentiments and elevated morality—of true and admirable views of life—and an eloquence burning and absorbing. Its success was unparalleled. Parisian society, engrossed by intrigues and follies, yet felt at its core that passion was the root even of these—depraved and distorted as passion was by their social laws and opinions; and, thus brought back to its natural expression, they were carried away by enthusiastic admiration. The women in particular, who are always the losers in a system of heartless gallantry,—since they seldom, if ever, cultivate a love of pleasure destitute of sentiment—as is the case with a number of men,—were charmed by a book which increased their influence by exalting love. Another interest was excited by the notion generally spread, that the book contained the history of the author's early life. Rousseau was identified with St. Preux, and gained by the idea. This work was followed by the "Emile,"—a book that deserves higher praise. That he adopted certain views from Locke and others, who had previously written on education, does not in the least deteriorate from its merit; that, as a system, it is full of faults and impracticability takes little from its utility. He shows the true end of education; and he first explained how children ought to be treated like younger men, not as slaves or automata. His success in casting an odium on the habit of putting infants out to nurse—his admirable aphorism, that children ought to be rendered happy, since childhood is all of life they may ever know—his exhortations to prepare the pupil to be a man in the first place, instead of considering him as a noble or gentleman in embryo—are among the most admirable of his principles. Others may regard the work disparagingly; but every parent who in any degree superintends the education of his offspring—every mother who watches over the health and welfare of her babes—will readily acknowledge the deepest obligations to the author of "Emile."