Having thus resigned myself to an unavoidable servitude, I surrendered without resistance and found it, at least for the first year, less onerous than I should have expected. Mme d’Épinay usually spent almost the whole summer in the country, but she was only there for a part of that one, perhaps because business required her to stay longer in Paris, perhaps because Grimm’s absence diminished her pleasure in living at La Chevrette. I profited by the intervals when she was not there or when she had a great many people with her, to enjoy my solitude with my good Thérèse and her mother so thoroughly as truly to appreciate its value. Although for some years I had fairly frequently gone into the country, I had hardly tasted its pleasures. Indeed my trips, generally made in the company of pretentious people and always ruined by a feeling of constraint, had merely whetted my appetite for rural delights; the closer the glimpse I got of them the more I felt the want of them. I was so tired of reception rooms, fountains, shrubberies, and flower-beds, and of those most tiresome people who made a show of them; I was so weary of pamphlets, clavichords, wool-sorting, and making knots, of stupid witticisms and tedious affectations, of tellers of little tales and great suppers, that when I spied a poor simple thorn bush, a hedge, a barn, or a meadow, when walking through a village I smelt a good chervil omelette, when I heard in the distance the rustic refrain of the goat-women’s song, I consigned all rouge, flounces, and perfumes to the devil, and in my longing for the housewife’s dinner and the local wine, I would gladly have slapped the faces of the chef and his master for making me dine at the hour I take my supper, and sup at the hour when I go to bed. But even more gladly would I have slapped the footmen who feasted their eyes on what I ate and compelled me, if I was not to the of thirst, to buy their master’s doctored wine from them at ten times the price I should have had to pay for better drink at an inn.
Here I was then at last, at home in a pleasant and solitary retreat, at liberty to pass my days in this independent, unvarying, and peaceful life for which I felt I was born. Before I record the effect of this unprecedented state of things upon my heart I must recapitulate and tell once more of my secret affections, so that the effect of my new change of circumstances may be traced to its source.
I have always regarded the day which united me to my Thérèse as the one that determined my moral being. I needed an attachment, for the one that should have sufficed me had been so cruelly broken. The longing for happiness is never quenched in the heart of man. Mamma was ageing and deteriorating. I saw clearly that she could never be happy again on earth. I was left to seek a happiness of my own, having lost all hope of ever sharing hers. I drifted for some time from idea to idea, from plan to plan. My journey to Venice would have launched me into public life if the man with whom I tied myself up had possessed any commonscnse. I am easily discouraged, particularly in difficult and lengthy enterprises. My failure in that one put me off all others; and since, following my old maxim, I looked on distant objectives as decoys for fools, I determined to live henceforth from day to day, and no longer saw anything in life that tempted me to strain after it.
It was at that precise moment that we came to know one another. That good girl’s sweet nature seemed to me so well suited to my own that I joined myself to her in an attachment that has defied time and injuries. Indeed, every trial that might have broken it has only served to make it stronger. The strength of this attachment will appear in the sequel when I will reveal the wounds and heart-burnings which I suffered for her when my miseries were at their height, without a word of complaint to anyone ever passing my lips up to the moment of my writing these lines.
When it becomes known that after having made every effort and braved every danger in order not to be parted from her, after having lived with her for twenty-five years in defiance of fate and mankind, I finally married her in my old age, without any expectation or entreaties on her part or any engagement or promise on mine, it may be supposed that a mad passion turned my head from the first day and led me by degrees to this last extravagance: a hypothesis which will appear even more credible when the special and powerful reasons are known which should have prevented me from ever reaching that point. What will the reader think when I tell him, with all the sincerity that he has come to expect of me, that from the first moment I saw her till this day I have never felt the least glimmering of love for her; that I no more desired to possess her than I had desired Mme de Warens, and that the sensual needs I satisfied with her were for me purely sexual and had nothing to do with her as an individual? He will believe that I was not made like other men, and that I was incapable of feeling love, since love did not enter into the feelings that attached me to the woman who has been dearest to me. Patience, my dear reader, the fatal moment is approaching when you will be only too rudely undeceived.
I am repeating myself, and I know it; but it is necessary. The first, the greatest, the strongest, the most inextinguishable of all my needs was entirely one of the heart. It was the need for intimate companionship, for a companionship as intimate as possible, which was the chief reason why I needed a woman rather than a man, a woman friend rather than a man friend. This singular need was such that the most intimate physical union could not fulfil it; only two souls in the same body would have sufficed. Failing that, I always felt a void. I believed that the moment had come when I should feel it no longer. This young person who had so many qualities to make her lovable – even good looks at that time – and was without a trace of artifice or coquetry, would have absorbed my whole existence within herself if I could have absorbed hers in me, as I had hoped. I had nothing to fear so far as other men were concerned. I am sure that I am the only one she has truly loved, and so cool are her passions that she has seldom felt the want of a man even when I have ceased to be one for her in that respect. Unlike myself, she had a family, every member of which so differed from her in character that it was impossible for me to adopt them as my own. Therein lay the first cause of my misfortunes. What would I not have given to be a son to her mother? I did all I could to that end, but I never succeeded. It was in vain that I tried to unite all our interests; it was impossible. Mme Le Vasseur always set up interests that differed from mine, that were opposite to mine, and even to her daughter’s, which were already inseparable from mine. She and her other children and grandchildren became so many bloodsuckers, and the least injury they did to Thérèse was to steal from her. The poor girl, accustomed to give in, even to her nieces, allowed herself to be robbed and ordered about without saying a word; and I saw to my distress that though I lavished money and advice upon her I could do nothing to help her. I tried to get her away from her mother; she always resisted. I respected her reluctance and esteemed her the more for it, but her refusal was none the less harmful to her interests and mine. In the power of her mother and her family, she was more theirs than mine, belonged to them more than to herself. Their greed was ruinous to her, but even more pernicious was their advice. In short, if thanks to her love for me and her own good character she was not completely their slave, she was so at least to the extent that the good principles I endeavoured to instil into her were largely deprived of their effect, and that never mind what efforts I made to overcome it, we always remained separate people.
So it was that in a sincere and mutual attachment into which I put all the affection of my heart, the void in that heart was nevertheless never really filled. Children came, who might have filled it; but that made things even worse. I trembled at the thought of entrusting them to that badly brought-up family, to be brought up even more badly. The risks of their upbringing by the Foundling Hospital were considerably less. This reason for the course I adopted was stronger than all those I set out in my letter to Mme de Francueil. It was, however, the only one that I dared not tell. I preferred to be less completely absolved from so grave a charge and so spare the family of the woman I loved. But it can be judged by the conduct of her wretched brother whether, whatever may be said on the subject, I should have been right in exposing m
y children to the risk of receiving an education like this.
Being unable to taste to the full the intimate companionship of which I felt the need, I looked for something in addition, which would not fill the void but which would make me less conscious of it. Lacking a single friend who would be entirely mine, I required friends whose energies would overcome my inertia. It was for this reason that I cultivated and strengthened my relationship with Diderot and the Abbé de Condillac, that I entered into a new and even more intimate relationship with Grimm, and that in the end, through that unlucky essay, the story of which I have told, I found myself unexpectedly thrown back into literature, which I thought I had abandoned for ever.
These fresh beginnings led me by a new path into a different intellectual world, possessing a simple and dignified economy which I could not look upon without enthusiasm. Soon, as I continued to explore it, I could see only foolishness and error in the doctrines of our sages, nothing but oppression and misery in our social order. Deluded by my stupid conceit, I thought that I was born to destroy all these deceits; and judging that in order to gain a hearing I must reconcile my actions to my principles, I adopted that singular course which I have not been allowed to pursue, and which my pretended friends have never been able to pardon, since it set an example which at first made me ridiculous, but which would finally have earned me respect if it had been possible for me to persevere with it.
Until then I had been good; from that moment I became virtuous, or at least intoxicated with virtue. This intoxication had begun in my head, but it had passed to my heart. The noblest pride sprang up there on the ruins of uprooted vanity. I played no part; I became indeed what I appeared; and for the four years at least that this exhilaration lasted in its full strength there was nothing great or beautiful that can enter into the heart of man, between earth and heaven, of which I was not capable. This was the origin of my sudden eloquence, and of the truly celestial fire which burned in me and spread to my early books, a fire which had not emitted the tiniest spark in forty years, because it was not yet kindled.
I was truly transformed; my friends and acquaintances no longer recognized me. I had ceased to be that shy creature, who was shamefaced rather than modest and who had not the courage to show himself or even to speak. I had ceased to be a man who was put out by a joking word and blushed at a woman’s glance. Bold, proud, and fearless, I now carried with me wherever I went a self-assurance which owed its firmness to its simplicity and which dwelt in my soul rather than in my outward bearing. The contempt which my deep reflections had inspired in me for the customs, the principles, and the prejudices of my age made me insensible to the mockery of those who followed them; and I crushed their little witticisms with my observations, as I might crush an insect between my fingers. What a change! All Paris repeated the sharp and biting sarcasms of that same man who two years before – and again ten years afterwards – could never find the right thing to say or the right word to use. No state of being could be found on earth more contrary to my true nature than this one. If ever there was a moment in my life in which I became another man and ceased to be myself, it was at the time I am speaking of. But instead of lasting six days or six weeks it lasted nearly six years, and would have endured to this day but for the particular circumstances that put an end to it and restored me to Nature, out of whose realm I had been trying to soar.
This change began as soon as I left Paris and the sight of that great city’s vices ceased to feed the indignation it aroused in me. When men were out of my sight I ceased to despise them; when the wicked were no more to be seen I ceased to hate them. My heart, which was not made for hatred, only caused me to deplore their wretchedness, and did not single out the part their wickedness played in it. This milder but far less exalted state of mind soon tempered the burning enthusiasm which had carried me away for so long; and imperceptibly, almost without observing it myself, I became fearful and shy once more – in a word I was the same Jean-Jacques as I had been before.
If this revolution had done no more than restore me to myself and had stopped there, all would have been well. But unfortunately it did go further, and carried me rapidly to the opposite extreme. From that time my soul has been in a state of disturbance, and has enjoyed only a passing moment’s equilibrium. For its perpetual oscillations have prevented its ever holding to its true line. Let us begin to describe this second revolution, a terrible and fatal epoch in a life unparalleled among human kind.
Since there were but three of us in our retreat, leisure and solitude were naturally bound to increase our intimacy, and they did so in the case of Thérèse and myself. Alone together beneath the trees, we spent delightful hours that I had never found so sweet before; and she too seemed to me to enjoy them better than ever in the past. She opened her heart to me without reserve, and told me things about her mother and her family that she had been strong-minded enough to conceal from me for some time. Mme Le Vasscur and the others had accepted great numbers of presents from Mme Dupin, which had been intended for me but which that cunning old woman, to save me from annoyance, had appropriated for herself and her other children without leaving anything for Thérèse and strictly forbidding her to mention the matter to me: a command which the poor girl had obeyed with a submissiveness that was almost past belief.
But one thing which surprised me much more was to learn that, in addition to the frequent private conversations that Diderot and Grimm had held with both mother and daughter for the purpose of detaching them from me – conversations which thanks to Thérèse’s resistance had led to nothing, – the pair of them had subsequently had a number of secret discussions with the mother alone, without Thérèse being able to find out what it was they were brewing amongst them. She only knew that little presents had played some part in it, and that there had been various minor comings and goings which they tried to keep from her, and the reasons for which were entirely unknown to her. When we left Paris Mme Le Vasseur had been for a long time in the habit of going to see M. Grimm two or three times a month, and of spending some hours with him in conversation so secret that Grimm’s manservant was always sent out of the room.
I concluded that the motive behind all this was none other than the old scheme into which they had tried to inveigle the daughter, by promising to procure them through Mme d’Épinay’s influence a salt-licence or a tobacco shop, by tempting them, that is, with the lure of gain. They had put it to them that I was not only incapable of doing anything for them, but on account of them could not even do anything for myself. As I saw nothing in all this that was not good in intention I could not really take it in bad part. The only thing about it that disgusted me was the mystery-mongering, particularly on the part of the old woman who, in addition, became every day more fawning and more wheedling in her attitude to me; which did not prevent her from ceaselessly scolding her daughter in private for being too fond of me, for telling me everything, for being nothing but a fool, and for being about to become a dupe.
That woman possessed to a supreme degree the art of running with the hare and riding with the hounds, of hiding from one party what she received from another, and from me what she received from them all. I might have forgiven her greed, but I could not forgive her deceptions. What could she have to conceal from me, from me whose happiness, as she knew so well, depended almost solely on her daughter’s happiness and her own? What I had done for her daughter I had done for myself. But what I had done for her deserved some recognition on her part. She ought to have been grateful for it, at least to her daughter, and have loved me out of love of Thérèse, who loved me. I had rescued her from utter poverty, she owed her subsistence to me, and to me she owed all the acquaintances whom she was putting to such good use. Thérèse had for long supported her by her work, and was now feeding her with my bread. She owed everything to this daughter, for whom she had done nothing; and her other children, to whom she had given dowries, for whom she had ruined herself, far from helping to keep their mother, still devoured
her substance and mine. I considered that under the circumstances she should regard me as her sole friend and most reliable protector, and that, instead of keeping me in the dark about matters that concerned me and plotting against me in my own house, she should inform me faithfully about anything of any importance to me, as soon as she learnt of it and before I did. In what light, then, could I view her false and secretive behaviour? What was I to think, furthermore, of the attitude she strove to inculcate into Thérèse? How monstrous must have been her ingratitude when she sought to instil it into her daughter?