Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius

1 The Loneliness of a Gifted Child\ \ "I was born in Geneva in 1712," Rousseau wrote in his Confessions, "son of \ Isaac Rousseau citoyen and Suzanne Bernard citoyenne." He was always \ proud of that citizenship, and when he became a prominent writer in Paris he \ signed himself Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Genève. But by then he \ had abjured the Protestant faith and thereby lost his citizenship rights in \ Geneva. Still later his books would be publicly burned there, and a standing \ warrant lodged for his arrest if ever he should return.\ \ The birth on June 28 was inauspicious. "I was born almost dying," \ he claimed without further explanation; "they had little hope of saving me." \ And a true disaster made his birth "the first of my misfortunes." Three days \ after he was baptized in the great cathedral on July 4, his mother died of \ puerperal fever. Half a century later, when he wrote his treatise on child \ development, Rousseau declared that a small child has no way of \ understanding death. "He has not been shown the art of affecting grief that he \ doesn't feel; he has not feigned tears at anyone's death, because he doesn't \ know what it is to die." But his own early experience was of being required to \ grieve for a mother whom he resembled disturbingly and had somehow killed, \ and this burden of guilt haunted his later life. If he was indeed born almost \ dying, he may well have felt that it would have been better if he had died in \ her place. Throughout his life he tended to see motherhood in a sentimental \ light; in middle age he wrotesolemnly to a young man seeking advice, "A \ son who quarrels with his mother is always wrong . . . The right of mothers is \ the most sacred I know, and in no circumstances can it be violated without \ crime."\ There was a lot Rousseau seems never to have known about his \ parents, including their ages; he thought his father was fifteen years younger \ than he actually was. He was even less well informed about his ancestors. \ Like many Genevan families, the first Rousseaus immigrated from France \ when Protestants began to be persecuted there. Didier Rousseau, Jean-\ Jacques' great-great-great-grandfather, arrived in Geneva in 1549 and went \ into business as a wine merchant. He had been a bookseller in Paris and \ may well have gotten into trouble, as his famous descendant did two \ centuries later, for subversive publications. It would be pleasant to think that \ Jean-Jacques was proud of this ancestor who had accepted exile for his \ beliefs, but there is no evidence that he ever heard of him.\ Didier's descendants became industrious tradespeople and \ artisans, leaving little trace in official records, but Jean-Jacques' father, Isaac, \ was an interesting character. He took up watchmaking as a trade, not \ surprisingly, since his grandfather, father, and brothers were all \ watchmakers. But he also loved music and played the violin well, and \ as a young man he abandoned the workshop to become a dancing master. \ Dancing was no longer forbidden by the Calvinist theocracy of Geneva, but it \ was not in good repute, and the Consistory — a committee of pastors and \ laymen that oversaw morals — limited it to foreign residents who refused to \ give it up. After a short time Isaac ended this dubious experiment and \ returned to the family trade, in which he eventually qualified as a master \ craftsman. Over the years, however, his volatile temper repeatedly got him \ into trouble. In 1699 he provoked a quarrel with some English officers who \ drew their swords and threatened him; it was he who was punished, since \ the authorities were anxious to propitiate foreigners. A similar incident would \ one day result in his virtual disappearance from his son's life.\ As Jean-Jacques understood it, his own origin was a sad chapter \ in a great romance. His mother's family was socially superior to the \ Rousseaus and disapproved of the daughter's alliance with a humble \ watchmaker, even though the pair had been inseparable since early \ childhood. According to the story in the Confessions, Suzanne advised Isaac \ to travel in order to forget her, but he returned more passionate than ever. \ She had remained chaste, they swore eternal fidelity, "and heaven blessed \ their vow." Meanwhile Suzanne's brother Gabriel fell in love with Isaac's sister \ Théodora, who insisted on a joint wedding, and so it was that "love arranged \ everything, and the two weddings took place on the same day."\ The facts that can be extracted from the records tell a rather \ different story. Suzanne's father, Jacques Bernard, had been jailed for \ fornication, and a year later was required to pay the expenses of an \ illegitimate child by a second mistress. He then married a third woman, Anne-\ Marie Marchard, and Suzanne was born six months later. When Suzanne \ was only nine her father died, in his early thirties, and the family took care \ afterward to erase his memory as much as possible. The kindly pastor \ Samuel Bernard, who raised her, and whom Jean- Jacques always believed \ to be her father (he died eleven years before the boy's birth), was actually her \ uncle.\ Suzanne was good-looking, musically talented, and evidently a \ spirited young woman. In 1695, when she was twenty-three, she was \ summoned before the Consistory to be rebuked for permitting a married man \ named Vincent Sarrasin to visit her. Equally provocatively, she showed an \ interest in the theater, which was illegal in Geneva except for street \ performances. One day in the Place Molard, "near the theater where they sell \ medicines and play farces and comedies, the maiden lady Bernard was seen \ dressed as a man or a peasant." Further inquiry established that she was \ disguised as a peasant woman, not as a man, and according to witnesses \ she claimed she wanted to see the farces without being recognized by her \ would-be lover, Sarrasin. She herself swore that none of this ever happened, \ but the Consistory delivered a stern verdict: "Persuaded, notwithstanding her \ denial, that we are well informed as to the truth of the said disguise, for which \ we have censured her severely, . . . we exhort her solemnly to have no \ commerce at all with M. Vincent Sarrasin."\ Eight years later, when she was thirty-one, Suzanne married \ Isaac Rousseau. This was not particularly late by the standards of the time. \ The age of majority was twenty-five, and in France as well as Geneva the \ average marriage age was twenty-eight, reflecting insistence on financial \ security and serving as well to hold down the birth rate. But the twin \ weddings Jean-Jacques evoked in the Confessions were a fairy tale. Isaac's \ sister did marry Suzanne's brother, but that happened five years earlier, \ barely a week before the birth of their child, a circumstance that provoked a \ stern condemnation by the Consistory. The infant died immediately, and this \ too was a story that Jean-Jacques never heard anything about. Instead he \ was encouraged by his family to harbor a highly romantic idea of his parents' \ and their siblings' irresistible attraction and triumph over obstacles.\ Isaac and Suzanne began their married life in comfortable \ circumstances, in the Bernards' elegant house at Grande Rue No. 40 in the \ fashionable upper town. It was customary for daughters to receive generous \ dowries and for sons to get smaller sums but to be established in a trade \ that would support their families. Isaac Rousseau had 1,500 florins from his \ father, equivalent to 750 French livres, not a fortune but not insignificant \ either: a family could get by on 200 livres per year and could live comfortably \ on 1,000. Suzanne, meanwhile, brought 6,000 florins, along with a piece of \ land in the Jura, a walnut wardrobe, a green leather writing case, and six \ coffee spoons. Nine months later their first son, François, was born.\ Before long the family found itself in financial difficulty, in part \ because of a general economic downturn, and it seems likely that Suzanne's \ mother, with whom they were living, made life increasingly disagreeable for \ her improvident son-in-law. At any rate, only three months after François' \ birth, Isaac departed for Constantinople, where he became watchmaker to \ the sultan. (That at least was his story; there is no evidence to confirm that \ he was so employed.) His departure was not quite so extraordinary as it \ might seem today, since Genevans were described by a contemporary \ as "the greatest vagabonds in the world," and in Isaac's immediate family one \ uncle lived in London, another in Hamburg, and a brother in Amsterdam; his \ brother-in-law lived in Venice and died in South Carolina, and a cousin \ traveled to Persia. Still, as Raymond Trousson comments, Constantinople \ was a long way to go to get away from a mother-in-law. While there, Isaac \ lived in a Genevan community whose Calvinist pastor mentioned him in a \ letter to his colleagues at home (praising them for "shining the torch of your \ piety and erudition in the midst of the shadows of the Papacy"). We know \ almost nothing of what Suzanne's life was like while Isaac was away, but \ Jean-Jacques believed she was happy. He recorded an impromptu poem she \ was said to have made up when walking with her sister-in-law, about the \ husbands who were also brothers and the wives who were also sisters, and \ he especially relished the story that the senior French diplomat in Geneva \ lost his heart to her, though without ever compromising her virtue.\ A year after his mother-in-law's death in 1710, Isaac Rousseau, \ having been absent for fully six years, finally came home, attracted no doubt \ by the 10,000 florins that Suzanne had inherited. Jean-Jacques was born \ nine months later and named after a wealthy godfather, who unfortunately \ died soon afterward. Then came the shocking loss entered in the official \ records: "On Thursday 7 July 1712, at eleven in the morning, Suzanne \ Bernard, wife of M. Isaac Rousseau, citizen and master watchmaker, aged \ thirty-nine, died of continued fever in the Grande Rue." All told, they had \ spent only two years of married life together.\ Isaac stayed on in his late wife's house, and his unmarried \ youngest sister, also named Suzanne, moved in to help with François and \ the new baby. As an adult Jean-Jacques could only guess at what his \ earliest years were like, for although he more than anyone else taught the \ world to pay attention to early childhood experiences, "I don't know what I did \ before the age of five or six." Looking back through the clouds of the troubled \ times that were to follow, he imagined it had been an era of idyllic \ contentment. "The children of kings could not have been cared for with more \ zeal than I was during my first years, idolized by everyone around me." \ Certainly he formed a close bond with his aunt Suzon, as he called her. In \ The Confessions he praised her as "a maiden lady full of graces, intelligence, \ and good sense" and fondly remembered his happiness watching her \ embroider and listening to her sing. "Her cheerfulness, her sweetness, and \ her pleasant face have left such strong impressions on me that I still see her \ manner, her expression, her attitude; I recall her little affectionate sayings; I \ could say how she was dressed and how she wore her hair, not forgetting the \ two curls that her black hair made on her temples, after the fashion of those \ days." He was especially grateful for the love of music she inspired in him, \ singing a prodigious number of songs "with a small, very sweet voice." In later \ life it always moved him to tears to sing one of them in particular, a pastoral \ air about the dangers of love, and he admitted that he avoided trying to locate \ the original words. "I'm almost certain that the pleasure I get from \ remembering this air would fade if I got proof that others sang it besides my \ poor aunt Suzon."\ Jean-Jacques would not have understood at first that Suzon was \ not his actual mother. Sixty years later, when she was past eighty and he \ had become famous, she dictated a letter to him (her eyesight was probably \ failing) in which she said that she always had "a maternal tenderness" for \ him, and signed herself "your affectionate and tender friend and aunt." In \ another letter the friend who transcribed her message added, "We've talked \ about you as the dearest object of her affection." In the Confessions \ Rousseau would say, "Dear aunt, I forgive you for having kept me alive, and it \ grieves me not to be able to give you, at the end of your days, the tender \ care you lavished on me at the beginning of mine." A few years later, when \ she died at the age of ninety-three, he paid a further tribute: "It is through her \ that I'm still attached to something of value on this earth, and no matter what \ people do, so long as I retain that I will continue to love life."\ There was another female figure in the boy's life: his nursemaid or \ mie, Jacqueline Faramand, a cobbler's daughter only sixteen years older \ than himself. Long afterward a Genevan whose father had likewise been \ cared for by Jacqueline said that she was adored for her kind heart, \ generosity, and gaiety. He remembered her saying that when the little Jean-\ Jacques unluckily tore a book and was locked up for several days in a \ garret, "the good Jacqueline was his sole consoler during that time." After \ Rousseau became a celebrity he wrote to tell her that he had never ceased \ to love her, adding rather grimly that she too was to blame for his continued \ existence. "I often say to myself amidst my sufferings that if my good \ Jacqueline had not taken such pains to preserve me when I was little, I would \ not have suffered such great misfortunes after I grew up."\ When François was twelve and Jean-Jacques five, a drastic \ change occurred. Increasingly pressed for cash, Isaac sold his wife's house \ for the impressive sum of 31,500 florins. Supposedly the money was to be \ held in trust for the two boys until they reached the age of twenty-five, and \ Isaac was to live on the interest in the meantime, but over the years he \ managed to get his hands on most of the principal as well. The family moved \ down the hill and across the Rhône to the rue de Coutance in the artisans' \ quarter of Saint-Gervais. Geneva was a small city at the time, with about \ 20,000 inhabitants (Lyon had 100,000 and Paris at least half a million). The \ distance between the two houses was not great, but there was a potent \ symbolic distinction between the upper and lower town, the inhabitants du \ haut and du bas, and this move was a painful descent from the privileged \ heights of the Bernard family, who had never cared much for their Rousseau \ in-laws.\ Isaac, Suzon, and the two boys occupied the fourth of five stories \ in an apartment house in a neighborhood of watchmakers, engravers, and \ silversmiths. Isaac's bedroom and workshop faced the street in order to get \ the best light for his exacting trade. On the other side, looking out on what is \ today the rue Rousseau, were a large kitchen and a bedroom that Jean-\ Jacques probably shared with Suzon. As it happens, the rue Rousseau got \ its later name from a misunderstanding. After the French Revolution his \ admirers preferred not to believe that he had been born in the fashionable \ upper town, and they installed a plaque — reverently viewed by such pilgrims \ as Stendhal, Dumas, Ruskin, and Dostoevski — on a different house in Saint-\ Gervais, one that had belonged to David Rousseau, his cold and ungenerous \ grandfather, with whom he seems to have had virtually no relationship.\ Many of Geneva's Protestant refugees from France had been \ skilled craftsmen, and the little city grew wealthy from trades such as \ watchmaking and jewelry, in a system by which bankers supplied raw \ materials and distributed work among a host of small workshops. Two men \ out of every ten, in fact, were watchmakers. Jean-Jacques always liked to \ think of himself as un homme du peuple, and his familiarity with skilled labor \ contributed to his scorn for "those important persons who are called artists \ rather than artisans, work solely for the idle and rich, and put an arbitrary \ price on their baubles." The artisan class was particularly proud of its \ intellectual abilities. "A Genevan watchmaker," Rousseau wrote, "is a man \ who can be introduced everywhere; a Parisian watchmaker is only fit to talk \ about watches." And indeed a British visitor commented, "Even the lower \ class of people are exceedingly well informed, and there is perhaps no city in \ Europe where learning is more universally diffused"; another at midcentury \ noticed that Genevan workmen were fond of reading the works of Locke and \ Montesquieu.\ The artisans of Geneva not only read about politics, they lived it, \ in a campaign of resistance to the privileged class that governed Geneva and \ would one day commit Rousseau's Social Contract to the flames. It has \ recently been demonstrated that the block in Saint-Gervais where the \ Rousseaus lived had more political agitators than any other. Even foreigners \ were struck by the open displays of class feeling, as an English aristocrat \ commented half a century later when he climbed nearby Mont Salève and \ was offended there by "a gang of bandylegged watchmakers, smoking their \ pipes, and scraping their fiddles, and snapping their fingers, with all that \ insolent vulgarity so characteristic of the Ruebasse portion of the Genevese \ community."\ Above all it was his father's example that inspired Jean-Jacques. \ Isaac Rousseau had plenty of faults: he was self-centered, quarrelsome, \ unreliable, and capable of abandoning his family with unconcern. These are \ not attractive traits, and Jean-Jacques suffered their consequences. But \ Isaac was also energetic, imaginative, and affectionate, a lover of music, \ books, and ideas. Most of all, his gifted son saw him as a companion, very \ different from the stern authority figures of Calvinist tradition, which included \ most of the relatives on the Bernard side. Isaac encouraged, or at least \ permitted, Jean-Jacques to develop in his own way, and made him feel like \ an equal as they shared their rather eccentric reading of the romantic novels \ left by his mother. These books — the best known is Astraea by Honoré \ d'Urfé — had been hugely popular in the previous century but were falling out \ of favor by the time Jean-Jacques encountered them, and would soon be \ supplanted by a more realistic kind of fiction. At first, when he was only six \ or seven, he and Isaac read together to help the boy practice his \ reading, "but soon our interest was so lively that we took turns reading them \ without a pause, and spent the nights like that. We could never stop before \ the end of the volume. Sometimes my father, hearing the swallows in the \ morning, would say all shamefaced, "'Let's go to bed; I'm more of a child \ than you are.'" As Rousseau later realized, precocious reading "gave me \ bizarre and romantic notions of human life, which experience and reflection \ have never been able to cure me of." It also gave him something else of \ immense value: a deep intuitive sense of literary style, of rhythm and \ emphasis and memorable phrasing. This early immersion in literature was \ crucial to his later development as one of the great masters of French prose. \ (He had less experience of poetry, and was never much good at it.) \ From time to time Isaac gave his son instruction of various kinds, \ for example bewildering the boy with a lecture on Copernican astronomy that \ helped convince him in retrospect that children are not ready to understand \ abstractions. Practical illustrations were more successful. "My first and best \ lessons in cosmography were received at a watchmaker's workbench with a \ polishing ball stuck with pins as the only instruments." As for books, when \ the novels gave out, an altogether different kind of reading took their place. \ His mother's uncle, the minister, had left a collection of ancient and modern \ classics, and the boy read these aloud to his father as he worked. Plutarch \ became his particular favorite. To him Plutarch's Lives of Noble Greeks and \ Romans was another kind of novel, displaying history not as a series of \ events — something he never took much interest in at any time — but as the \ noble actions of a series of heroes. Once again the imaginative boy found \ himself vicariously exalted. "Constantly occupied with Rome and Athens, \ living so to speak with these great men, and son of a father whose love of the \ fatherland was his strongest passion, I inflamed myself with their example. I \ believed myself to be Greek or Roman; I would become the character whose \ life I was reading." Once at the table he went so far as to alarm the family by \ holding his hand over a flaming chafing dish, in imitation of a brave Roman \ named Scaevola who allowed his hand to be burned off. His love for "my \ master and comforter Plutarch" never waned; a friend said that he knew \ Plutarch by heart and could have found his way in the streets of Athens \ better than in Geneva.\ In some ways the Geneva of Rousseau's youth was the closest \ thing to a classical city-state in the modern world. Surrounded by powerful \ and often threatening neighbors, it had preserved its independence and would \ not become part of Switzerland until 1814, a full century after Rousseau's \ birth. In theory Geneva was governed democratically by a General Council of \ all male citizens, who were a minority of the total population; the majority \ were immigrants called "inhabitants," their descendants were "natives," and \ all lacked the rights of citizenship. In practice, however, the city was \ controlled by a small group of wealthy families that made up the Council of \ Two Hundred, which in turn delegated actual power to a twenty-five-member \ executive known as the Little Council. No Rousseau was ever elected to the \ Council of Two Hundred, which would have implied elevation to the haute \ bourgeoisie.\ Living in the workers' quarter with a father who loved to debate \ politics, Rousseau grew up believing in the sovereignty of the people but well \ aware that the governing oligarchy made a mockery of it. "A sovereign that \ never performs an act of sovereignty is an imaginary being," said the patriot \ Pierre Fatio in 1707, calling for democratic reform. The Little Council had him \ shot. One positive result of the Fatio affair was that the authorities were \ induced to publish the Edicts of the Republic of Geneva, in effect admitting \ that until then citizens had no way to read the laws they were supposed to \ obey. Isaac Rousseau was in Constantinople at the time and missed the \ excitement, but his father, David, supported Fatio's protest and was \ disciplined as a result.\ In later life Rousseau settled on a sentimental picture of his \ father, "the virtuous citizen from whom I received my being," meditating at his \ workbench on the sublime insights of political thought. "I see Tacitus, \ Plutarch, and Grotius mingled before him with the tools of his trade; I see at \ his side a cherished son receiving, with all too little profit, the tender \ instruction of the best of fathers." In the end no one could say that Rousseau \ failed to profit from this early instruction. What he learned was that Geneva \ had betrayed the city-state ideal, and The Social Contract would be founded \ on a profound theory of the sovereignty of the people. Like the hero of his \ novel Julie, Rousseau was a roturier, a commoner, and when he proudly \ signed himself "citizen of Geneva" he was asserting membership in a patrie \ or fatherland. For as a writer said in 1736, "Today there is more true nobility \ in a Swiss roturier who is citizen of a fatherland than in a Turkish basha who \ is subservient to a master."\ In his mid-forties, writing in praise of an idealized Geneva, \ Rousseau recalled a memorable incident in his childhood when a group of \ citizen soldiers finished their maneuvers in a volunteer militia.\ \ Most of them gathered after the meal in the Place Saint-Gervais and began \ dancing all together, officers and soldiers, around the fountain, onto which \ drummers, fifers, and torch-carriers had climbed . . . The women couldn't \ remain at their windows for long, and they came down. Wives came to see \ their husbands, servants brought wine, and even the children, awakened by \ the noise, ran around half-dressed among their fathers and mothers. The \ dance was suspended, and there was only embracing, laughter, toasts, \ caresses . . . My father, hugging me, was overcome by trembling in a way \ that I can still feel and share. "Jean-Jacques," he said to me, "love your \ country. Do you see these good Genevans? They are all friends, they are all \ brothers, joy and concord reign in their midst."\ \ What Rousseau did not say but expected his readers to \ understand was that throughout Europe militias were thought of as \ embodiments of popular spirit, in contrast to the mercenary armies of their \ rulers. Indeed, the citizen bands of Geneva were regarded with great \ suspicion by the oligarchy. But as a boy he was most impressed by the \ mood of spontaneous celebration, and he relished the all too rare experience \ of belonging to a group. Eventually his native city would remember this \ moment with civic pride, and today the site of his childhood home bears an \ enormous stone plaque engraved with his father's solemn injunction, "Jean-\ Jacques, aime ton pays." But since Geneva would condemn Rousseau as an \ enemy of the state before it eventually resurrected him as a patron saint, it is \ symbolically appropriate that the house itself is gone. It was demolished in \ the 1960s during a period of urban renewal, and the plaque is an incongruous \ megalith on the façade of a department store.\ Notwithstanding the tender nostalgia with which Rousseau \ recalled his early years, there is reason to believe that the period was more \ troubling than he wanted to remember. François was six when Isaac returned \ from Constantinople, and seven when Jean-Jacques' arrival caused his \ mother's death; his resentment of his younger brother would surely have \ been apparent. Still more disturbingly, Isaac Rousseau, even while claiming \ to dote on his younger son, subjected him to emotional blackmail. "Never did \ he hug me without my feeling, in his sighs and convulsive embraces, a bitter \ regret mingled with his caresses . . . 'Ah!' he would say, groaning, 'give her \ back to me, console me for her, fill up the void she has left in my soul.'" \ Moreover, he would imply, alarmingly, that the boy's chief merit was that he \ looked like the lost Suzanne, and would exclaim, "Would I love you like this if \ you were only my son?" Interestingly, Jean-Jacques resembled Isaac as well \ as Suzanne. A Genevan who met him when he was in his forties remarked, "I \ recognized him on the spot, by his look of his late father, who was one of my \ friends."\ The family as the boy perceived it was essentially sexless, with \ parent figures who were brother and sister, not mates. He had to admit that \ his father was "a man of pleasure," but he managed to believe that Isaac \ observed the strictest chastity and devoted his life to grieving for his lost wife. \ With this idealized example before him, Jean-Jacques was a good little boy, \ but François became a very bad boy indeed. In the Confessions Rousseau \ says rather vaguely that François "took up the life of a libertine, even before \ he was old enough really to be one." Official records show that at thirteen, \ when François had been bound as an apprentice watchmaker, he was \ committed to a house of correction "at the request of his father on account of \ his libertinage" (which would have meant unruly behavior of all kinds, not \ necessarily sexual). François made so little progress in his trade that four \ years later, humiliatingly, he had to be apprenticed all over again to a different \ master.\ What Jean-Jacques remembered most vividly about family life in \ those early years was his own privileged position, along with a gratifying \ conviction that he could inspire affection in his brother (whose name he \ neglects to mention in the Confessions). "I scarcely saw him at all, and I can \ barely say that I made his acquaintance, but I didn't fail to love him tenderly, \ and he loved me too, so far as a rascal can love anything." When he \ developed a theory of childhood Rousseau took it for granted that affection \ between siblings could only be casual and shallow. "The child knows no \ attachments except those of habit; he loves his sister as he does his watch." \ Given the trade that Isaac followed and François bungled, the watch was an \ interesting example to choose.\ On one memorable occasion Jean-Jacques had a chance to play \ the hero on his brother's behalf. "I remember that once when my father was \ punishing him roughly and angrily, I threw myself impetuously between them, \ embracing him tightly. I covered him like that with my body, receiving the \ blows that were intended for him, and kept up that posture so well that in the \ end my father let him off, whether because he was disarmed by my cries and \ tears or because he didn't want to treat me worse than him." The incident \ made so deep an impression that Rousseau re-created it in his novel Julie, \ with fascinating transpositions: there an enraged father beats the young \ heroine mercilessly while her self-sacrificing mother interposes and receives \ the blows. Perhaps little Jean-Jacques was trying to appease François' \ resentment for all the ways he had made his life worse, or perhaps he had \ learned that accepting punishment was a way to extort affection. In the novel \ the father remorsefully kisses his daughter's hand and calls her his dear girl, \ and she fondly declares as she relates the incident, "I would be only too \ happy to be beaten every day at the same price, and no treatment could be \ so harsh that a single one of his caresses wouldn't efface it from the depths \ of my heart." For little Jean-Jacques, already predisposed perhaps to feelings \ that today would be called masochistic, it had been an opportunity to \ insinuate himself into an exciting emotional scene and to take his place \ literally at the center.\ In later years Rousseau needed to believe that his early childhood \ had been a paradise of security. "My father, my aunt, my mie, our friends, \ our neighbors, all those around me didn't obey me, to be sure, but they loved \ me, and I loved them likewise. My desires were so little aroused and so little \ contradicted that it never occurred to me to have any." The worst thing he \ could remember doing was mischievously urinating into the cooking pot of a \ disagreeable old woman named Mme Clot, who lived next door. Admittedly, \ most of this period of his life remains a blank; a chronology of his life that \ runs to four hundred pages has only two entries for the year 1720: \ \ Rousseau and his father read the historians and moralists from the library of \ his uncle, pastor Samuel Bernard.\ Rousseau pisses in the cooking pot of Mme Clot.\ \ To the improbable claim that his desires were never contradicted, however, \ one should add what his alter ego Saint-Preux says in Julie: "Is there any \ being on earth weaker, more impoverished, more at the mercy of everything \ around it, with so great a need for pity, love, and protection, as a child?"\ Two other anecdotes survive, not included in the Confessions but \ recorded by Rousseau elsewhere, and both calculated to illustrate self-\ sacrificing generosity. On one occasion when he was visiting an uncle's \ textile workshop, his fingers were crushed in a roller by a careless cousin. \ He was confined to bed for three weeks, unable to use his hand for two \ months, and permanently scarred, but he stoutly protected his cousin by \ claiming that a rock had fallen on his fingers. Another time he was playing \ the mallet game mail (what the English called pall-mall) and got into a quarrel \ with a friend who whacked him on the head so violently "that if he had been \ any stronger, he would have knocked my brains out." Once again the other \ boy was aghast and repentant, and once again Jean-Jacques was in a \ position to forgive nobly.\ However much Rousseau may have wanted to remember those \ early years as idyllic, it is clear that he felt plenty of anxiety about who he \ was and how much he was valued. Whenever he wrote about childhood, he \ seemed determined to minimize affective relationships. His character Julie, \ though an ideal mother, makes the extraordinary claim that a child of four or \ five is virtually incapable of emotional response, so that "our children are dear \ to us for a long time before they are able to feel it and love us in return." Still \ more strikingly, in Émile the father is relegated to obscurity, and the tutor \ who raises Émile never expects love or even affection — he is thus the \ opposite of the unstable and emotionally demanding Isaac Rousseau — \ while the boy is brought up with the understanding that he is "indifferent to \ everything outside himself, like all other children, and takes no interest in \ anyone."\ Idyllic or not, the period at the rue de Coutance came to a sudden \ and shocking end. Isaac had a passion for hunting rabbits and fowl in the \ fields outside the city, and would return in the evening weary, bramble- torn, \ and happy. "I remember the pounding heart my father experienced at the \ flight of the first partridge, and the transports of joy with which he would find a \ hare he had been seeking for a whole day." But in 1722, when Jean-Jacques \ had just turned ten, Isaac got into a disastrous quarrel as a result of one of \ these excursions. Near the village of Meyrin just outside Geneva, a former \ army captain named Pierre Gautier noticed two men trampling a field of his \ that had not yet been mowed. One of them was Isaac Rousseau. According \ to Gautier's later testimony, when he told them to leave, Isaac threatened \ him with his gun. The aggrieved landowner hurried to the village to get \ reinforcements, but when he came back with some farmers the trespassers \ had vanished.\ Four months later, however (the exact date is recorded, October \ 9), Gautier was in Geneva on business and became aware of a man staring \ at him meaningfully, who then said angrily, "You're having a good look at me; \ do you want to buy me?" It was Isaac, who reminded Gautier of the incident \ in the fields, grabbed him by the arm, and exclaimed, "Don't say another \ word; let's go out of town and settle this with the sword." In fact it was \ unusual for artisans to wear swords; Isaac apparently did so as a sign that \ he had been unjustly reduced to the plebeian world of Saint-Gervais. It was \ all the more infuriating, therefore, when Gautier retorted cuttingly that he had \ drawn his sword many times but used only sticks on people of an inferior \ social class. Isaac thereupon wounded Gautier on the cheek before \ bystanders could separate them. When a magistrate looked into the case \ the next day, several witnesses reported that Isaac had repeatedly \ shouted, "Listen, you'd better remember this: I am Rousseau!" Nevertheless, \ well aware that some of Gautier's relatives were magistrates, he failed to \ show up at the hearing, and when an officer went to arrest him a week later \ he was nowhere to be found.\ Isaac's own story, as Jean-Jacques heard it, was that he gave \ Gautier a bloody nose but never actually drew his sword, and that he chose \ to leave Geneva forever rather than yield on a point of honor. Since the \ authorities waited an entire week to arrest him, it seems likely that they \ anticipated his flight and regarded exile rather than prison as the best \ solution, ridding the city permanently of a hot-tempered and insubordinate \ character. In later life Rousseau emphasized the political aspect of the affair, \ regarding his father as a heroic victim of class injustice. He liked to tell the \ story of a group of bourgeois who were talking and laughing in the street \ when an aristocrat, suspecting that the joking was aimed at him, demanded \ furiously, "Why are you laughing while I'm passing by?" One of the men \ replied, "So why are you passing by while we're laughing?"\ But at the time, what Jean-Jacques must have felt most deeply \ was an astonishing abandonment, by his mother figure as well as his father. \ Isaac settled in the lakeside town of Nyon, fifteen miles from Geneva in the \ Vaud territory governed by Berne, and Suzon accompanied him there; she \ married a local man and stayed for the rest of her life. Jean- Jacques made \ occasional visits to Nyon, but Isaac showed little interest in him from then \ on, and Suzon seems to have pretty much disappeared from his life. Left with \ two unwanted boys on their hands, the Bernard family took prompt action. \ François was bound over to a demanding new master, with whom he would \ be expected to live, and Jean-Jacques and his cousin Abraham Bernard were \ sent to board with a pastor in the village of Bossey, three miles beyond the \ city walls.\ \ \ Copyright © 2005 by Leo Damrosch. Reprinted by permission of Houghton \ Mifflin Company.

ContentsList of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 1. The Loneliness of a Gifted Child 7 2. The End of Innocence 25 3. “I Desired a Happiness of Which I Had No Idea” 43 4. Rousseau Finds a Mother 69 5. A Year of Wandering 88 6. In Maman’s House 104 7. The Idyll of Les Charmettes 125 8. Broadening Horizons: Lyon and Paris 149 9. The Masks of Venice 168 10. A Life Partner and a Guilty Secret 184 11. A Writer’s Apprenticeship 196 12. The Beginnings of Fame 211 13. Rousseau’s Originality 234 14. Lionized in Geneva, Alienated in Paris 244 15. An Affair of the Heart 256 16. The Break with the Enlightenment 284 17. Peace at Last and the Triumph of Julie 306 18. Rousseau the Controversialist: Émile and The Social Contract 331 19. Exile in the Mountains 362 20. Another Expulsion 388 21. In a Strange Land 403 22. The Past Relived 434 23. Into the Self-Made Labyrinth 447 24. The Final Years in Paris 464 Timeline of Rousseau’s Life 495 Notes 499 Index 550

\ Stacey SchiffThere is no adequate way to explain how a man born in chains became so free. In this case the reader is in no position to complain, however. Rousseau pioneered the concept that ideas fell out of experience, and the erratic, inventive urgency of the life is all here. A delight to read, Damrosch comes as close to Rousseau's authentic self as we are likely to get.\ — The New York Times\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyConsidering Rousseau's prominence and historical importance, it is surprising to discover that (according to the publisher) this is the first single-volume biography in English. Damrosch, a professor of literature at Harvard University, has succeeded in presenting an incisive, accessible and sensitive portrait of this unpleasant, infuriating "restless genius." Sometimes, indeed, perhaps a little too sensitive: Damrosch's admiration can prevent his strongly condemning where condemnation is due. Rousseau (1712-1778) was the man, we should recall, who consigned his own infants to a foundling home, who sent a miserably small sum of money to his ailing former patroness and who bought an adolescent girl for nefarious purposes. Where Damrosch truly excels is in not only masterfully explaining the originality and meaning of mile, The Social Contract and the Confessions, but in relating those works to their author's conflicted, contradictory psyche. As Rousseau himself admitted, "I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices." Also, in vividly delineating the sage's final decade for the first time, Damrosch has performed a signal service: Maurice Cranston, who was writing a three-volume biography, died before completing the last part-thereby leaving readers in the dark as to Rousseau's fate. No longer. 43 b&w illus. Agent, Tina Bennett. (Nov. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ Library JournalDamrosch (literature, Harvard Univ.; Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense) relates the life and works of the 18th-century man who so uncannily prefigured the modern mind. While interweaving Rousseau's own writing, which traversed philosophy, politics, fiction, educational theory, music, and more, Damrosch focuses on his subject's life, imbued by dramatic moments of encounter, departure, and epiphany (some known only from his autobiographical Confessions). There is the 16-year-old's decision to turn his back on Geneva, the meeting and new life with Madame de Warens, the inspired self-teaching, the volatile flirtations and friendships, and the dramatic flights from persecution for publishing "dangerous" works. Over 40 illustrations, plus a time line, will enhance the reader's enjoyment. Raymond Trousson's biography of Rousseau is yet to be translated into English; the most recent biography in English is Maurice Cranston's three-volume study, its attention to Rousseau's final years curtailed by Cranston's death. Damrosch collegially offers tasty quotes from these and other sources (all well documented). His greatest accomplishment may be that he will entice nonspecialists to turn to Rousseau and his world and undertake further study for themselves. Highly recommended for public and undergraduate libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/05.]-Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThoroughgoing life of the often disagreeable, uncharismatic and world-transformative philosopher, he of "Mankind is born free and is everywhere in chains" renown. The French edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's complete published works runs to 10,000 pages, though Rousseau, characteristically, wished late in life that he had not written a word. As Damrosch (Literature/Harvard Univ.) shows, anyone who had known young Rousseau would not have bet on his becoming world-famous in his own lifetime. Rousseau, Damrosch writes, was the motherless son of a Geneva watchmaker-no disqualification, for, as an 18th-century thinker noted, the artisans of the city "were fond of reading the works of Locke and Montesquieu" and were in many instances thoroughly radicalized. Rousseau's father spirited away a good bit of the inheritance that was supposed to one day be the son's, and when he remarried, Jean-Jacques presciently went out the door to seek his fortune on his own. He proved a poor apprentice though a sometimes helpful servant, and he insinuated himself in a few noble households while pondering what to do next, one observer volunteering that the best he could aspire to was "becoming a village priest." Rousseau chose another path, devouring a few libraries with the hungriness and half-method of an autodidact, then unleashing a torrent of words on the world of the dawning Enlightenment. One of the chief virtues of Damrosch's always virtuous biography-apart from accounting for Rousseau's late, little-studied years-is his close reading of Rousseau's oeuvre, from minor prose poems to major treatises such as emile and The Social Contract, which reconciles the events of his subject's never easy life with theoften contradictory ideas he came to espouse about such things as the noble savage and social equality, for which he is still remembered. A vigorous, lucid biography of perhaps the most influential thinker of his day, with plenty of juicy gossip about his extracurricular life.\ \ \ \ \ From the Publisher"These pages...bring to astonishing life...an impossible man whose books made modern life possible....Immensely enjoyable and fast-paced."—Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club and American Studies\ "An incisive, accessible, and sensitive portrait . . . Damrosch has performed a signal service." Publishers Weekly\ "The erratic, inventive urgency of the life is all here. A delight to read."—Stacy Schiff The New York Times Book Review\ \ \