d The poor youth was ill dealt with. "That is very fine," said rude Duclos, "but remember that a fool in lace is still a fool." Rousseau, in reply to the child's importunity, was still blunter: "Sir, I am no judge of finery, I am only a judge of man; I wished to talk with you a little while ago, but I wish so no longer."1 2 Marmontel, whose account may have been coloured by retrospection in later years, says that before the success of the first Discourse, Rousseau concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness that was timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance, you perceived mistrust and observant jealousy; there was no freedom in his manner, and no one ever observed more cautiously the hateful precept to live with your friends as though they were one day to be your enemies. Grimm's description is different and more trustworthy. Until he began to affect singularity, he says, Rousseau had been gallant and overflowing with artificial compliment, with manners that were honeyed and even wearisome in their soft elaborateness. All at once he put on the cynic's cloak, and went to the other extreme. Still in spite of an abrupt and cynical tone he kept much of his old art of elaborate fine speeches, and particularly in his relations with women.3 Of his abruptness, he tells a most displeasing tale. "One day Rousseau told us with an air of triumph, that as he was coming out of the Opera where he had been seeing the first representation of the Village Soothsayer, the Duke of Zweibrücken had approached him with much politeness, saying, 'Will you allow me to pay you a compliment?' and that he replied, 'Yes, if it be very short.' Everybody was silent at this, until I said to him laughingly, 'Illustrious citizen and co-sovereign of Geneva, since there resides in you a part of the sovereignty of the republic, let me represent to you that, for all the severity of your principles, you should hardly refuse to a sovereign prince the respect due to a watercarrier, and that if you had met a word of good will from a watercarrier with an answer as rough and brutal as that, you would have had to reproach yourself with a most unseasonable piece of impertinence.' 1 Madame d'Epinay's Mém., ii. 55. 2 Mém., Bk. iv. 327. 4 Ibid., 54. There were still more serious circumstances when exasperation at the flippant tone about him carried him beyond the ordinary bounds of that polite time. A guest at table asked contemptuously what was the use of a nation like the French having reason, if they did not use it. "They mock the other nations of the earth, and yet are the most credulous of all." ROUSSEAU: "I forgive them for their credulity, but not for condemning those who are credulous in some other way." Some one said that in matters of religion everybody was right, but that everybody should remain in that in which he had been born. RouSSEAU, with warmth: "Not so, by God, if it is a bad one, for then it can do nothing but harm." Then some one contended that religion always did some good, as a kind of rein to the common people who had no other morality. All the rest cried out at this in indignant remonstrance, one shrewd person remarking that the common people had much livelier fear of being hanged than of being damned. The conversation was broken off for a moment by the hostess calling out, "After all, one must nourish the tattered affair we call our body, so ring and let them bring us the joint." This done, the servants dismissed, and the door shut, the discussion was resumed with such vehemence by Duclos and Saint Lambert, that, says the lady who tells us the story, "I feared they were bent on destroying all religion, and I prayed for some mercy to be shown at any rate to natural religion." There was not a whit more sympathy for that than for the rest. Rousseau declared himself paullo infirmior, and clung to the morality of the gospel as the natural morality which in old times constituted the whole and only creed. "But what is a God," cried one impetuous disputant, "who gets angry and is appeased again ?" Rousseau began to murmur between grinding teeth, and a tide of pleasantries set in at his expense, to which came this: "If it is a piece of cowardice to suffer ill to be spoken of one's friend behind his back, 'tis a crime to suffer ill to be spoken of one's God, who is present; and for my part, sirs, I believe in God." "I admit," said the atheistic champion, "that it is a fine thing to see this God bending his brow to earth and watching with admiration the conduct of a Cato. But this notion is, like many others, very useful in some great heads, such as Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, where it can only produce heroism, but it is the germ of all mad nesses." ROUSSEAU: "Sirs, I leave the room, if you say another word more," and he was rising to fulfil his threat, when the entry of a new-comer stopped the discussion.1 His words on another occasion show how all that he saw helped to keep up a fretted condition of mind, in one whose soft tenacious memory turned daily back to simple and unsophisticated days among the green valleys, and refused to acquiesce in the conditions of changed climate. So terrible a thing is it to be the bondsman of reminiscence. Madame d'Epinay was suspected, wrongfully as it afterwards proved, of having destroyed some valuable papers belonging to a dead relative. There was much idle and cruel gossip in an ill-natured world. Rousseau, her friend, kept steadfast silence: she challenged his opinion. "What am I to say?" he answered; "I go and come, and all that I hear outrages and revolts me. I see the one so evidently malicious and so adroit in their injustice; the other so awkward and so stupid in their good intentions, that I am tempted (and it is not the first time) to look on Paris as a cavern of brigands, of whom every traveller in his turn is the victim. What gives me the worst idea of society is to see how eager each person is to pardon himself, by reason of the number of the people who are like him."2 Notwithstanding his hatred of this cavern of brigands, and the little pains he took to conceal his feelings from any individual brigand, whether male or female, with whom he had to deal, he found out that "it is not always so easy as people suppose to be poor and independent." Merciless invasion of his time in every shape made his life weariness. Sometimes he had the courage to turn and rend the invader, as in the letter to a painter who sent him the same copy of verses three times, requiring immediate acknowledgment. "It is not just," at length wrote the exasperated Rousseau, "that I should be tyrannized over for your pleasure; not that my time is precious, as you say; it is either passed in suffering, or it is lost in idleness; but when I cannot employ it usefully for some one, I do not wish to be 1 Madame d'Epinay's Mém., i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated his atheism afterwards in the Catéchisme Universel. 2 Madame d'Epinay's Mém., i. 443. hindered from wasting it in my own fashion. A single minute thus usurped is what all the kings of the universe could not give me back, and it is to be my own master that I flee from the idle folk of towns,-people as thoroughly wearied as they are thoroughly wearisome-who because they do not know what to do with their own time, think they have a right to waste that of others." The more abruptly he treated visitors, persecuting dinner-givers, and all the tribe of the importunate, the more obstinate they were in possessing themselves of his time. In seizing the hours they were keeping his purse empty, as well as keeping up constant irritation in his soul. He appears to have earned forty sous for a morning's work, and to have counted this a fair fee, remarking modestly that he could not well subsist on less. He had one chance of a pension, which he threw from him in a truly characteristic manner. When he came to Paris, he composed his musical diversion of the Muses Galantes, which was performed (1745) in the presence of Rameau, under the patronage of M. de la Popelinière. Rameau apostrophized the unlucky composer with much violence, declaring that one-half of the piece was the work of a master, while the other was that of a person entirely ignorant of the musical rudiments; the bad work therefore was Rousseau's own, and the good was a plagiarism. This repulse did not daunt the hero. Five or six years afterwards on a visit to Passy, as he was lying awake in bed, he conceived the idea of a pastoral interlude after the manner of the Italian comic operas. In six days the Village Soothsayer was sketched, and in three weeks virtually completed. Duclos procured its rehearsal at the Opera, and after some debate it was performed before the court at Fontainebleau. The Plutarchian stoic, its author, went from Paris in a court coach, but his Roman tone deserted him, and he felt shamefaced as a schoolboy before the great world, such divinity doth hedge even a Lewis xv., and even in a soul of Genevan temper. The piece was played with great success, and the composer was informed that he would the next day have the honour of being 1 Corr., i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756. 2 Letter to Madame de Créqui, 1752.-Corr., i. 171. 3 Conf., vii. 104. presented to the king, who would most probably mark his favour by the bestowal of a pension.' Rousseau was tossed with many doubts. He would fain have greeted the king with some word that should show sensibility to the royal graciousness, without compromising republican severity, "clothing some great and useful truth in a fine and deserved compliment." This moral difficulty was heightened by a physical one, for he was liable to an infirmity which, if it should overtake him in presence of king and courtiers, would land him in an embarrassment worse than death. What would become of him if mind or body should fail, if either he should be driven into precipitate retreat, or else there should escape him, instead of the great truth wrapped delicately round in veracious panegyric, a heavy, shapeless word of foolishness? He fled in terror, and flung up the chance of pension and patronage. We perceive the born dreamer with a phantasmagoric imagination, seizing nothing in just proportion and true relation, and paralysing the spirit with terror of unrealities; in short, with the most fatal form of moral cowardice, which perhaps it is a little dangerous to try to analyse into finer names. When Rousseau got back to Paris, he was amazed to find that Diderot spoke to him of this abandonment of the pension with a fire that he could never have expected from a philosopher, Rousseau plainly sharing the opinion of more vulgar souls that philosopher is but fool writ large. "He said that if I was disinterested on my own account, I had no right to be so on that of Madame Le Vasseur and her daughter, and that I owed it to them not to let pass any possible and honest means of giving them bread. . . . . This was the first real dispute I had with him, and all our quarrels that followed were of the same kind; he laying down for me what he insisted that I should do, and I refusing because I thought that I ought not to do it." Let us abstain, at this and all other points, from being too sure that we easily see to the bottom of our Rousseau. When we are most ready to fling up the book and to pronounce him all selfishness 1 The Devin du Village was played at Fontainebleau on October 18, 1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March, 1753. Madame de Pompadour took a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to her, Corr., i. 178. 2 Conf., viii., 190. |