CHAPTER VII

THE END.

BEFORE leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions of philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be, with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken up the trade of friendship for

man and adopted the phrases of perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a Fénelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.

Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race. Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in Rousseau's books: "I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the moment." He wrote to tell

him so, but he told him at the same time at great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with Hume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in the midst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities. He concludes with a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes, with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseau to take up his residence in whichever of them may please him best.1

Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and Mirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of the parliaStreckeisen, ii. 315-328.

ment of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But the Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, "bore letters as a plum-tree bears plums," and wrote to his guest with strange humoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew his Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himself against excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to take society more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth should lead him to do. "No doubt its outside is a shifting surfacepicture, nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaseless flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own fault for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary the scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of it all." Enormous

manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility were not in the least degree either soothing or interesting to Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touch his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener. Two humorists are seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau insisted that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books. Rousseau answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it. "I do not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always been painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other people, and at present I cannot

1 Streckeisen, ii. 337.

do so at all." Though they continued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four weeks at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of Conti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrous fashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away at the time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refuge at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors. Here he installed Rousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.

2

Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental confusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume, and that he was watched day and night with a view to his destruction. He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interest he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense. He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare seed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more the same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled Corr., v. 172.

1 June 19, 1767.

2 Corr., v. 267, 375.

from Wootton. He meant apparently to go to Chambéri, drawn by the deep magnetic force of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his way thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that he had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of droning wretchedness. Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at Monquin on adjoining uplands.2 The estrangement from Theresa, of which enough has been said already,3 was added to his other torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us to be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his face eastwards,

1 Corr., v. 330-381, 408, etc.

1

2 Bourgoin, Aug. 1768, to March, 1769. Monquin, to July 1770.

3 See above, vol. i. chap. iv.