The Confessions

  Having lost three days by this delay, I had already greatly outstayed the twenty-four hours which the Bernese had allowed me in which to leave their territory and, knowing their severity, I was somewhat worried as to the conditions under which they would permit me to cross their land when the Governor of Nidau most opportunely relieved me of my anxiety. As he had openly disapproved of Their Excellencies’ violent action against me, he believed, in his generosity, that he owed me public proof that he had nothing to do with it; and he was not afraid to leave his township to pay me a visit at Bicnne. He came on the day before my departure and, far from coming incognito, he assumed a certain amount of ceremony and arrived, all dressed up, in his carriage, with his secretary, bringing me a passport made out in his own name permitting me to cross Bernese territory without fear of molestation. His visit touched me more than the passport. I should have been no less appreciative of it if it had been paid to someone else. I know of nothing so potent in its effect on my feelings as an act of courage performed at the right moment on behalf of the weak, unjustly oppressed.

  At last, having with difficulty procured a carriage, I left that murderous land on the following morning, before the arrival of the deputation with which they intended to honour me, and even before I could see Thérèse, to whom I had sent a message when I expected to stay in Bienne, to join me there. I had barely time to countermand this by a short note, informing her of my new disaster. It will be seen in the third part of my Confessions,* if ever I have strength to write it, how though I thought I was setting out for Berlin I was in fact leaving for England, and how the two ladies† who were trying to control me, after having driven me by weight of intrigue from Switzerland, where I was not sufficiently in their power, finally managed to deliver me over to their friend.‡

  I added what follows on the occasion of reading these Confessions to the Count and Countess d’Egmont, Prince Pignatelli, the Marchioness de Mesmcs, and the Marquis de Juigné.

  I have told the truth. If anyone knows anything contrary to what I have here recorded, though he prove it a thousand times, his knowledge is a lie and an imposture; and if he refuses to investigate and inquire into it during my lifetime he is no lover of justice or of truth. For my part, I publicly and fearlessly declare that anyone, even if he has not read my writings, who will examine my nature, my character, my morals, my likings, my pleasures, and my habits with his own eyes and can still believe me a dishonourable man, is a man who deserves to be stifled.

  Thus I concluded my reading, and everyone was silent. Mme d’Egmont was the only person who seemed moved. She trembled visibly but quickly controlled herself, and remained quiet, as did the rest of the company. Such was the advantage I derived from my reading and my declaration.

  THE END

  * She had talents much above her station. For her father the minister, who adored her, had taken great pains with her education. She drew, sang, and played accompaniments on the lute; she was well read and wrote very fair verses. Here is an impromptu which she composed as she was walking with her sister-in-law and their two children, apropos some remark made about her absent husband and brother:

  Ces deux messieurs qui sont absens

  Nous sont chers de bien des manières:

  Ce sont nos amis, nos amants,

  Ce sont nos maris et nos frères,

  Et les pères de ces enfants.

  [These two absent gentlemen are dear to us in many ways. They are our friends and our lovers, they are our husbands and our brothers, and they are these children’s fathers.]

  [* Torturer.]

  [* Bridled ass. Bernard is the ass in the medieval Roman de Renard, and the local pronunciation seems to have been Barnâ.]

  * ‘Oh! combien de Césars deviendront Laridons.’ [How many Caesars will become low dogs.] La Fontaine.

  * A group of Catholic noblemen who in 1527 swore to eat the people of Geneva ‘with a spoon’, and wore one round their necks to remind them of their oath. They made several attacks upon the city.

  [* Actually only two.]

  [* Marshal Keith, of whom more is told in the Twelfth Book,]

  * Cursed dog ! foul beast!

  [* None of the temporal facts about Rousseau’s sojourn at the hospice are reliable. He would seem to have made his abjuration earlier than he says, and to have stayed there for some time afterwards.]

  * Cruscantism – the affectation of using only words authorized by the Accademia della Crusca of Florence.

  † Seventeenth-century grammarian and member of the Académie Française.

  * Wry-neck.

  [* Rightly Hiero-fountain, after its inventor, Hiero of Alexandria; a toy that depended on air-pressure.]

  [* Two characters in Rousseau’s novel, The New Héloïse.]

  [* Probably Addison’s Spectator, but possibly a French imitation by Marivaux.]

  † Perhaps an ancient respect for their masters’ blood still spoke for him in those traitors’ hearts.

  [* This is doubtful. She seems to have received no payments after 1749.]

  [* The Duchess de Luxembourg and Mme de Mirepoix. This incident is mentioned again in Book X.]

  * Narcisse ou L’Amant de lui-même.

  * Lettres de la montagne.

  [* She was sent to Paris on a secret mission by the King of Sardinia.]

  [† Victor Amadeus II abdicated in 1730.]

  [‡ This hypothesis seems unlikely. Mme de Warens took good care to ingratiate herself with the new king of Sardinia, Charles-Emmanuel III.]

  [* At the end of June.]

  [† Rousseau was writing at Wootton, Staffordshire.]

  [* Actually the Château de la Tour.]

  * Le Juge-mage, who administered justice in the King’s name.

  [* A letter from Rousseau to his father, written several months later, shows that the old man had more or less disowned him for becoming a Catholic. The interview must have been a stormier one than Jean-Jacques would here have us suppose.]

  [* Perhaps that of a music master. M. Merceret was an organist.]

  *Quel caprice!

  Quelle injustice!

  Quoi! ta Clarice

  Trahiroit tes feux! etc.

  * ‘Gaze, gentlemen: this is Pelasgian blood.’

  [* At this point Rousseau wrote to his father exposing the sad state of his affairs. It seems therefore that the ambassador did nothing for him immediately.]

  [† Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1671–1741) the lyrical poet.]

  [* This is towards the end of 1731, and Mme de Warens had actually left Paris in the summer of 1730.]

  † Tu croyois, vieux pénard, qu’une folle manie

  D’élever ton neveu m’inspireroit l’envie.

  * Apparently I had not yet acquired the expression I have since been given in my portraits.

  *Les Bains de Thomery.

  † The Antonines were a community of secularized monks

  [* Mlle du Châtelet would appear to have been a member of some secularized order.]

  [* Who had abdicated in 1730, in favour of his son Charles-Emmanuel III.]

  [* Probably at the end of the year.]

  [* Rousseau’s new hobby was botany. See later.]

  [* There is no confirmation of this story, and it has been suggested by some biographers that Anet died of grief, or killed himself, on finding himself supplanted in Mme de Warens’s affections by Jean-Jacques.]

  * The earth, hell, and heaven too, all tremble before the Lord.

  * I have seen him since and found him utterly changed. What a mighty magician is M. Choiseul! Not one of my old acquaintances has withstood his powers of transformation.

  * A book on chess by the Italian chess player Gioacchino Greco, called the Calabrian.

  * [Rousseau is mistaken. The lease of Les Charmettes was not taken till 1738.]

  * This used to be my prayer: a moderate-sized piece of land, with a garden, a spring near the house, and a small wood besides.

  † The gods have blest me with more t
han I desire (Horace, Satires, II, No. 6).

  [* The Jansenist centre.]

  [* ‘By the words of the master’, an allusion to the disciples of Pythagoras, who exactly preserved their master’s teaching.]

  * Lettres de la montagne.

  [* He died in 1738, and cannot have been Rousseau’s confessor when he was at Les Charmettes.]

  [† Actually Father Coupier (1679–1768).]

  [* This would be in the summer of 1737. But the stay at Les Charmettes, just described, belongs to 1738. There is great confusion here in Rousseau’s memories.]

  [* I have retained the eighteenth-century word, although hypochondria or even hysteria would be a modern translation. But Rousseau did not see his condition in modern terms and thought of himself as suffering like some young lady from ‘a fit of the vapours’.]

  [* Another reference to the incident in Scarron’s Roman comique.]

  [† She would have been forty-four at the time, and had been the mother of the children.]

  [* Actually Taulignan.]

  [* Character in Marivaux’s comedy The Legacy; the Marquis is absurdly bashful, his bride the reverse.]

  [* Jean-Samuel-Rodolphe Wintzenried (1706–72). His father was quite an important official.]

  [* In April 1740.]

  [* Named after his uncle the Abbé de Condillac of the French Academy (1715–80), author of the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge.]

  [* In May 1741.]

  [* Belonging to the Prince de Conti with whom Rousseau stayed after leaving England.]

  [* Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (historian and philosopher, 1709–85).]

  [* Pierre-Joseph Bernard (1710–75), a minor poet so nicknamed by Voltaire.]

  † Unless at the outset he is deceived in his choice, or the person for whom he has formed an attachment afterwards changes her character through a concatenation of extraordinary circumstances – which is not absolutely impossible. If this rule were admitted without modification, Socrates would have to be judged by his wife Xantippe, and Dion by his friend Calippus, which would be the falsest and unfairest judgement ever passed. Further, let there be no insulting application of this to my wife. She is, it is true, more limited and more gullible than I had supposed; but her pure, excellent, and guileless nature has earned my entire esteem, and will have it for so long as I live.

  [* Daniel Roguin (1691–1771), a Swiss who had been in Dutch service.]

  [† An instrument for producing colour harmonies; the primary colours, corresponding to the seven notes of the scale, were projected by the notes of a keyboard similar to that of a harpsichord.]

  [* René-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur, doctor and scientist (1683–1757).]

  [* Tangents which meet the curve at infinity.]

  * I believed this so implicitly over so long a time that it was to him I entrusted the manuscript of my Confessions after my return to Paris. The distrustful Jean-Jacques has never been able to believe in perfidy and falsehood until he has been the victim of it.

  [* Valet to the Cardinal de Fleury.]

  [† A louis was worth 24 francs, a pistole 10.]

  * It may have been the Teatro di San Samuelo. Proper names entirely escape me.

  [† A masked lady.]

  [* Very seldom, however, for of the letters that survive none bear his signature.]

  * My lovely one will save me

  For, see, my heart’s on fire.

  * So as not to appear too much of a fool.

  [* Her girdle, or possibly her bouquet.]

  * Give up the ladies, and study mathematics.

  [† Actually a year only.]

  * I have given up this idea.

  * La Princesse de Navarre.

  † Fêtes de Ramire.

  * Le Temple de la gloire.

  * O mort! viens terminer les malheurs de ma vie!

  [* Actually seventy-five.]

  [* The storehouse for theatrical properties, which was used for rehearsals.]

  * L’Engagement téméraire.

  † L’Allée de Sylvie.

  * It was to this M. Ancelet that I gave a little comedy of mine entitled The Prisoners of War, which I wrote after the French defeats in Bavaria and Bohemia, and which I never dared show or acknowledge, and that for the singular reason that the King of France and the French have perhaps never received such high or genuine praise as in that play, and that as an avowed Republican and oppositionist I had not the courage to confess myself the panegyrist of a nation all of whose principles were the opposite of my own. More distressed by France’s misfortunes than the French themselves, I was afraid of being accused of flattery and cowardice when expressing my sincere affection, the date and origins of which I have mentioned in my First Part, but which I was ashamed to reveal.

  * The Chaffer.

  [† Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83).]

  ‡ Le Dictionnaire encyclopédique.

  § Pensées philosophiques.

  || Lettre sur les aveugles.

  [* Actually Emmanuel Christoph Klüpfel, founder of the Almanach de Gotha 1712–76).]

  [* Actually Count von Friesen, nephew of Marshal de Saxe.]

  [† Le lieutenant criminal: the magistrate of a Paris court. The translation, although rather free, gives the force of the nickname.]

  [* Can Rousseau be suggesting that he feared the children might inherit criminal tendencies from the Le Vasseur side?]

  * I have no doubt that M. de Francueil and his friends now give a very different account of all this. But I would refer to what he said to people at the time and for a long while afterwards up to the hatching of the plot. This will be remembered, no doubt, by men of honesty and good sense.

  [* M. Josse in Molière’s L’Amour médecin, who had a habit of strongly recommending various things in which he had a commercial interest.]

  [† Actually Joseph de Menoux, King Stanislas’s chaplain.]

  * Le Devin du village.

  [* A rich naturalized German (1723–89).]

  * Since I have omitted to relate a trifling but memorable adventure which I had with the aforesaid M. Grimm one morning when we were to dine at the spring at Saint-Vandrelle, I will let it pass; but on thinking it over subsequently, I have come to the conclusion that even then he was hatching in his inmost heart the plot that he afterwards carried out with such prodigious success.

  * Les Amours de Ragonde, a masked comedy with words by Destouches and music by Mouret.

  [* This was the nickname of Rebel and Francceur, who had become well known in their youth from their habit of going out together to play the violin in various houses.]

  * I could not foresee that, notwithstanding my Dictionary, this would actually be said at a later date.

  [† By Pergolesi]

  [* Le Parlement de Paris.]

  * Everyone loves justice in another man’s case.

  * Le Discours sur l’inégalité.

  † At the time when I wrote that essay I had as yet no suspicion of Diderot’s and Grimm’s great plot; otherwise I should easily have seen how the former abused my confidence to give my writings that hard tone and sombre colouring which they ceased to have when he no longer acted as my mentor. The piece about the philosopher who argues with his ears stopped up in order to harden himself against the complaints of a man in distress, is of his making; and he supplied me with other ideas even harsher, which I could not bring myself to use. But as I attributed his black humour to his confinement in the keep of Vincennes – for there is a pretty strong tinge of it in his Clairval - it never came into my head to suspect him of any malicious intention.