Rousseau's Confessions (Part II / III)
The true Reign of Terror was the Paris opera debates of '53...
The Solenoid Notebooks is a series of letters reporting on the capacious field of literary and bibliographical references within Cărtărescu’s big book, translated by Sean Cotter.
Solenoid is a massive, ambitious novel that, in addition to spinning a long conspiratorial narrative, kind of summarizes the last century of modernist aesthetics and art in Europe and their relationship with scientific and mathematical knowledge. We’ll try to elucidate the many literary and historical threads woven into this meganovel, one book at a time.
These letters are meant to accompany my review piece that ran in Asymptote.
We’re pressing on with the let’s read of Rousseau’s Confessions. This letter covers the middle four books of this huge memoir-novel.
V
It’s the first half of the 1730s, and Jean Jacques’s life just continues to roll on.
In these pages, he reads escapist novels and books of science, and gets cultivated by de Warens into the Catholic-oriented life of the mind and letters. In these “uniform” conditions of relative stability, his life is “as simple as it was agreeable.”
After the King’s survey, Jean Jacques becomes a music teacher, and he travels to Besancon to study with the Abbe Blanchard.
Meanwhile, he’s carrying on an affair with “Mamma” de Warens (“she treated me as a man”), who is also sleeping with the gardener Claude Anet, while they’re all living under one roof.
This plays out like the opposite of Marquis de Sade—in fact, the more sexually charged their relationship becomes, “I all at once observed that her manner was graver, and her discourse more moral than usual.”
“‘Tis true that this participation gave me a cruel uneasiness,” he says, but the rationale is that “her only motive was to guard me from dangers, which appeared otherwise inevitable.” That is, being satisfied with de Warens, Jean Jacques won’t try seducing his music students.
The trouble is that the ménage a tois was mutually understood but not openly acknowledge. Anet is technically an older rival to Jean Jacques but he’s also a kind of father figure (“he became for me a sort of governor, who saved me from many follies; I held him in respect…”)—this is getting too weird.
Emotional tensions come to a head, and Anet attempts suicide by poisoning. In 1734 he dies a few days after getting heat stroke.
It’s in this sequence that a long striking passage emerges, concerning women’s work:
Knitting, for instance, is absolutely as bad as doing nothing; you must take as much pains to amuse a woman whose fingers are thus employed, as if she sat with her arms crossed; but let her embroider, and it is a different matter; she is then so far busied, that a few intervals of silence may be borne with. What is most disgusting and ridiculous, during these intermissions of conversation, is to see, perhaps, a dozen over-grown fellows, get up, sit down again, walk backwards and forwards, turn on their heels, play with the chimney ornaments, and rack their brains to maintain an inexhaustible chain of words: what a charming occupation! Such people, wherever they go, must be troublesome both to others and themselves.
He pivots instantaneously to these lines, which may be considered an Enlightenment-era defense of gaming:
When I was at Motiers, I used to employ myself in making laces with my neighbors, and were I again to mix with the world, I would always carry a cup-and-ball in my pocket; I should sometimes play with it the whole day, that I might not be constrained to speak when I had nothing to discourse about; and I am persuaded, that if every one would do the same, mankind would be less mischievous, their company would become more rational, and, in my opinion, a vast deal more agreeable; in a word, let wits laugh if they please, but I maintain, that the only practical lesson of morality within the reach of the present age, is that of the cup-and-ball.
VI
From 1736 to 37 Jean Jacques is having an idyllic time hanging out with de Warens at her country estate Les Charmettes. There’s time to read again.
Here is Rousseau on the tribulations of the reading process and reading multiple books at once:
…I find it impossible to employ myself half an hour together intently on one subject, particularly while following another person’s ideas, for it has frequently happened that I have pursued my own for a much longer period with success. After reading a few pages of an author who must be followed with close application, my understanding wanders and I become lost in the clouds, and should I obstinately continue, I tire myself to no purpose, I am dazzled and am no longer conscious of what I read; but in a succession of various subjects, one relieves me from the fatigue of the other, and without finding respite necessary I can follow them with pleasure.
It’s a true pastoral vibe at Les Charmettes: “Dinners on the grass at Montagnole, suppers in our arbour, gathering in the fruits, the vintage, peeling hemp with our servants—all these were so many holidays, in which Mamma took as much pleasure as myself.”
He carries out chemistry experiments, resembling and feeling like a sorcerer, and even injures himself in an accident.
Also in this book, Jean Jacques returns to Geneva to claim his mother’s inheritance, and even meets up with his dad, for whom the authorities have apparently turned down the heat. He gives a good deal of the money to de Warens as thanks for her financial support, “and the moment in which I gave the money into her hands, was to me a thousand times more delightful than that which gave it into mine.”
In this period he also develops some maladies and hypochondriac tendencies. Reading physiology doesn’t ease his paranoia: “I could not read the description of any malady without thinking it mine … Finding in every disease symptoms similar to mine, I fancied I had them all…”
He uses another chunk of his inheritance to fund a trip to Montepelier, to consult with the famous physician Dr. Fizes. But on the way, he runs Madam de Larnage, the next glamorous woman to enter Jean Jacques’s life.
His relationship with de Warens is still a mommy-gf kind of situation, which leaves him as a boyish invalid. With de Larnage, on the other hand, “adieu to poor Jean Jacques, or rather farewell to fever, vapors, and polypus; all completely vanished when in her presence.”
But when Jean Jacques comes back from his health retreat, he finds that—betrayal!—de Warens has replaced him with a young stud.
The new-comer had shown himself zealous and exact in all her little commissions, which were ever numerous, and he diligently overlooked the laborers. As noisy and insolent as I was quiet and forbearing, he was seen or rather heard at the plough, in the hay-loft, wood-house, stable, farm-yard, at the same instant. He neglected the gardening, this labor being too peaceful and moderate; his chief pleasure was to load or drive the cart, to saw or cleave wood; he was never seen without a hatchet or pick-axe in his hand, running, knocking and hallooing with all his might. I know not how many men’s labor he performed, but he certainly made noise enough for ten or a dozen at least.
He stays with de Warens just a little longer in hopes the thing can work. But Adam has been cast out of Paradise.
He becomes a tutor to the children of the de Mablys in Lyon. Unfortunately he’s a lousy teacher. “With patience and temper I might have succeeded; but wanting both, I did nothing worth mentioning, and my pupils profited very little.”
It’s also in this period, likely from the trauma of separating from de Warens, that Jean Jacques hilariously shifts into Le mode gobelin.
If failing the children were bad enough, he starts ogling Madam de Malby, and then he starts stealing wine bottles and bread from the kitchen and taking it to his quarters. “It was impossible to make a reserve of this article, and to have it brought by the footman was discovering myself, and insulting the master of the house; I could not bear to purchase it myself; how could a fine gentleman, with a sword at his side, enter a baker’s shop to buy a small loaf of bread? it was utterly impossible.”
VII
It’s the early 1740s, and Rousseau is about to make his splash onto the musicology scene, with his new system of notation.
He reads a paper at the Academy of Sciences, takes questions and parries refutations. “I was constantly surprised at the facility with which, by the aid of a few sonorous phrases, they refuted, without having comprehended me.”
He publishes a manuscript on modern music, and his minor celebrity gets him access to other hot-shots in the Parisian literati. He makes some new friends, including a harpsichordist named Madam de Broglie, and Diderot, in his early thirties just like Rousseau.
“This soon formed betwixt us a more intimate connection, which lasted fifteen years, and which probably would still exist were not I, unfortunately, and by his own fault, of the same profession with himself.”
Rousseau then lands a job, with de Broglie’s recommendation, as secretary to the Count de Montaigu, ambassador to Venice.
The voyage to Venice involves a month of quarantine at Messina due to plague.
It’s a very disagreeable several months in Montaigu’s employ, even though Jean Jacques seems to have done an admirable job as secretary in Venice. Quarrels and frictions go on, until the comte accuses Jean Jacques of stealing his ciphers, and threatens to have him arrested or defenestrated. That’s the last straw for Rousseau, who leaves without formal dismissal.
Venice involves some adventures with some strange female characters. Most memorable is with a prostitute named Zuliette.
Just as things get going, he freaks out and strikes his forehead. She had a “withered ‘teton,” that is, a breast with a missing nipple.
I immediately began to consider how it was possible to have such a defect, and, persuaded of its proceeding from some great natural vice, I revolved the matter in my brain till I was clearly convinced that, instead of the most charming person of whom I could form an idea, I had in my arms a species of monster, the outcast of nature, of men, and of love.
Back in Paris, Rousseau keeps working as a secretary for the Dupin family. A year prior to that, he meets Theresa, whom he marries.
These are rather hand-to-mouth years as Rousseau finds limited success with his literary efforts.
When Theresa gets pregnant, Rousseau persuades her to give the baby up to adoption.
This information is delivered in some chillingly spare lines:
[I] gave her a cipher which I had made double upon two cards; one of them was put into the linen of the child, and by the midwife deposited with the infant in the office of the foundling hospital according to the customary form. The year following, a similar inconvenience was remedied by the same expedient, excepting the cipher, which was forgotten: no more reflection on my part, nor approbation on that of the mother; she obeyed with trembling.
It’s the late 1740s, Rousseau has abandoned his first two children, and his father has died. It’s also period when Rousseau contributed an article on music for Diderot’s Encyclopedia project:
Diderot was desirous I should do something in this second undertaking, and proposed to me the musical part, which I accepted. This I executed in great haste, and consequently very ill, in the three months he had given me, as well as all the authors who were engaged in the work. But I was the only person in readiness at the time prescribed. I gave him my manuscript, which I had copied by a lackey, belonging to M. de Francueil, of the name of Dupont, who wrote very well. I paid him ten crowns out of my own pocket, and these have never been reimbursed me. Diderot had promised me a retribution on the part of the booksellers, of which he has never since spoken to me nor I to him.
The work is cut off, however, when Diderot gets imprisoned in Vincennes in 1749.
VIII
Just hang on, ‘cause a lot goes down in book 8 of the Confessions.
This is where all of Rousseau’s troubles in later life began, according to him. And it begins with meeting Friedrich Grimm.
I was transported with joy when I learned from him he could play an accompaniment on the harpsichord. After dinner was over music was introduced, and we amused ourselves the rest of the afternoon on the harpischord of the prince. Thus began that friendship which, at first, was so agreeable to me, afterwards so fatal, and of which I shall hereafter have so much to say.
But then something else equally momentous occurs.
Rousseau hears the good news that Diderot has been released from prison and now on parole and a sort of house arrest in a castle in Vincennes. The writer goes to visit him, where he is also hanging out with D’Alembert—these two individuals are featured in Diderot’s Dreams, written a couple decades after these events and published posthumously; it’s one of the supreme expressions of Enlightenment-era materialism.
It’s in Vincennes, during the excessively hot summer of 1749, that Rousseau reads in a journal the essay topic proposed by the Academy of Dijon: “Has the progress of sciences and arts contributed to corrupt or purify morals?”
The question immediately animates Rousseau’s mind. “I seemed to behold another world, and became a different man.” He’s driven to write a response and enter the essay contest. “I did so, and from that moment I was ruined.”
“All the rest of my misfortunes during my life were the inevitable effect of this moment of error,” he says in a one-line paragraph.
The result is Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, aka the First Discourse, which marks Rousseau’s literary debut and the genesis of his intellectual life.
It wins the Dijon prize, and gets published in 1751.
Around this time, his wife Therese has gotten pregnant with their third child. And here finally Rousseau the narrator actually tries to account for himself with abandoning his progeny. This must be the central and very darkest of his confessions—he had lied and stolen things in youth, but what of this?
I will satisfy myself by observing that my error was such, that, in abandoning my children to public education for want of the means of bringing them up myself; in destining them to become workmen and peasants, rather than adventurers and fortune-hunters, I thought I was acting the part of a citizen and father, and considered myself as a member of the republic of Plato.
“My third child was therefore carried to the foundling hospital as well as the two former, and the next two were disposed of in the same manner; for I have had five children in all.”
He proceeds to detail his living arrangements at this time, his work as a music copyist, and the return of his hypochondriac tendencies—“I was born in a dying state.”
But of course Rousseau is tasked with defending his First Discourse against the wave of criticism in response. “My discourse had no sooner appeared than the defenders of letters fell upon me as if they had agreed with each to do it. My indignation was so raised at seeing so many blockheads…”
One of those “blockheads” was King Stanislaus of Poland, to which Rousseau wrote a belabored reply. “My friends, concerned for my safety, imagined they already saw me in the Bastile.” He also defends an attack from a certain M. Gautier with a Letter to Grimm.
A third polemic erupts between Rousseau and Bordes of Lyons. Bordes was a friendly bookseller than Jean Jacques had met in book 7, but things have gone in a soured and libelous direction, according to the author.
While handling these controversies, Rousseau seems to evolve into a standoffish and prickly guy, practicing a sort of austerity of manners:
[T]hrown into the world in despite of myself, without having its manners, or being in a situation to adopt and conform myself to them, I took it into my head to adopt others of my own, to enable me to dispense with those of society. My foolish timidity, which 1 could not conquer, having for principle the fear of being wanting in the common forms, I took, by way of encouraging myself, a resolution to tread them underfoot. I became sour and a cynic from shame, and affected to despise the politeness which 1 knew not how to practise.
His next work, an opera called Le devin du village is a huge hit, so much so that King Louis XV offers a lifetime pension, which Rousseau refuses. Nevertheless he has secured fame and fortune. “I had a numerous acquaintance, yet no more than two friends: Diderot and Grimm.”
Meanwhile, Paris is hit with a wave of Italian opera bouffa—high comedic works, similar to Mozart’s Figaro—sparking an aesthetic debate that apparently reached the pitch of political struggle.
The bouffons acquired for Italian music very warm partisans. All Paris was divided into two parties, the violence of which was greater than if an affair of state or religion had been in question. One of them, the most powerful and numerous, composed of the great, of men of fortune, and the ladies, supported French music; the other, more lively and haughty, and fuller of enthusiasm, was composed of real connoisseurs, and men of talents, and genius. This little group assembled at the opera-house, under the box belonging to the queen. The other party filled up the rest of the pit and the theatre; but the heads were mostly assembled under the box of his majesty. Hence the party names of ‘Coin du Roi,’ ‘Coin de la Reine,’ then in great celebrity. The dispute, as it became more animated, produced several pamphlets. The King’s corner aimed at pleasantry; it was laughed at by the Petit Prophete. It attempted to reason; the Lettre sur la Musique Francoise refuted its reasoning. These two little productions, the former of which was by Grimm, the latter by myself, are the only ones which have outlived the quarrel; all the rest are long since forgotten.
During this period of success in the mid 1750s, Rousseau and Therese and their friend de Gauffecourt make a trip to Geneva, but apparently Gauffencourt, despite being sixty, “crippled by the gout, impotent and exhausted by pleasures,” keeps hitting on Therese whenever Rousseau isn’t around, up to the point of “attempting to inflame her imagination by the reading of an abominable book,” which she throws out of the carriage window.
While passing through Lyons (after ditching the old creeper) Rousseau meets his old mamma De Warens,
I saw her—Good God, in what a situation! How contemptible! What remained to her of primitive virtue? Was it the same Madam de Warens, formerly so gay and lively, to whom the vicar of Pontverre had given me recommendations? How my heart was wounded! The only resource I saw for her was to quit the country.
Meanwhile, Rousseau has completed his Second Discourse, on the Inequality of Mankind. He also gets his citizenship as a Genevan restored. “The persons deputed spoke for me, and I answered yes and no, like a blockhead; I was afterwards admitted to the communion, and reinstated in my rights as a citizen.”
But he resolves not to retire in Geneva but to go back to Paris. His rationale interestingly involves Voltaire.
One thing which greatly aided me in determining, was the residence Voltaire had chosen near Geneva; I easily comprehended this man would cause a revolution there, and that I should find in my country the manners, which drove me from Paris; that I should be under the necessity of incessantly struggling hard, and have no other alternative than that of being an unsupportable pedant, a poltroon, or a bad citizen. The letter Voltaire wrote me on my last work, induced me to insinuate my fears in my answer; and the effect this produced confirmed them. From that moment I considered Geneva as lost, and I was not deceived. I perhaps ought to have met the storm, had I thought myself capable of resisting it. But what could I have done alone, timid, and speaking badly, against a man, arrogant, opulent, supported by the credit of the great, eloquent, and already the idol of the women and young men? I was afraid of uselessly exposing myself to danger to no purpose. I listened to nothing but my peaceful disposition, to my love of repose, which, if it then deceived me, still continues to deceive me on the same subject. By retiring to Geneva, I should have avoided great misfortunes; but I have my doubts whether, with all my ardent and patriotic zeal, I should have been able to effect anything great and useful for my country.
In any event, the Second Discourse is published in April 1755.