The Confessions Read online

  The style of Rousseau’s writing is on the whole an easy one, which grows rather careless as his book proceeds. He is capable of composing descriptive passages of great beauty. The tale of the children’s tree planting, the incident of the periwinkle growing by the roadside, his first crossing of the Alps, his day picnic with Mlle de Graffenried and her friend, all these are narrated with an exactness and an economy that cannot fail to charm. He is the master, too, of psychological analysis. The description of his own character in the First Book, the gradual building up of the portrait of Mme de Warens and the tale of his unfortunate passion for Mme d’Houdetot – to take three incidents almost at random – are remarkable for their objective clarity. He had, however, a weakness for apostrophe that to-day, especially in his moments of self-pity, clumsily alienates the sympathy he is so anxious to arouse. His rhetorical tricks are very much of his age, and it has been possible to tone them down slightly in translation.

  ‘It is a little curious’, wrote Morley, whose study of Jean-Jacques is still one of the most readable, ‘that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his opinions, and so unscientific in his methods of coming to them, should have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the controversialists of a very controversial time.’ The reason is perhaps that he was never liable to be tempted into digressions. His mind worked too slowly for that. What in his muddled way he felt, he felt with the single-minded conviction of a fanatic. So, despite the length of his Confessions, he seldom strays from the task he has set himself. He intends to tell the truth about the extraordinary man that he is, and nothing can deflect him from it.

  The outspokenness of certain passages has been much dwelt on by more reticent generations than his or ours. But his sexual revelations are quite devoid of prurience. Indeed, when we have read his account of his amatory exploits we feel quite convinced that he was particularly unsuccessful as a lover. Sex seems to have pervaded most of his feelings in a diluted form. His ecstasies in field and woodland, his admirations and excitements, all seem to have drained off his sexual energy and left him too little to sustain any relationship more exacting than his humdrum partnership with Thérése Le Vasseur. As to the story of the abandonment of their children to the Foundling Hospital, there is no alternative but to take his word for it. Several of those in whom he claimed to have confided that sordid story were alive when the Confessions were first published and, had it been a fiction, someone would no doubt have contradicted it.

  Such was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. There is no need to recapitulate the tale of his first fifty-three years. It was substantially as he himself tells it in these Confessions. For the rest, on leaving the territories of Berne in 1764 he received offers of asylum from several friends. Irresolutely he set out for Potsdam, got as far as Strasbourg, changed his mind and was persuaded finally to accept Hume’s invitation and come to England. After a couple of months in London, during which he met Johnson -who thought very little of him – and Burke – who thought even less – he was granted a pension by George III, and left for Wootton, Staffordshire, where he lived in the house of a Mr Davenport and wrote the first six Books of the Confessions. Without any Knowledge of English and with no companion except Thérèse, he spent the winter of 1766 in this bitterly cold exile, and then quarrelled with Hume, whom he accused of taking part in the plot against him, and of being the author of a scurrilous attack, which was in fact written by Horace Walpole. He hastily left the country, to take refuge at the château of Trye, where he lived as the Prince de Conti’s guest, under an assumed name, in mortal fear that Hume might pursue him. During the next years he moved on to Grenoble, and then by way of various small places to Lyons, during which time he finished the Confessions. Finally, in the summer of 1770 he was allowed to return to Paris, where he spent the last eight years of his life, and where his feelings of persecution to some extent lifted. Here he took up his old pursuit of music-copying, moved in society more modest than before, and endured considerable poverty, since he was unwilling to draw George III’s pension. His final Reveries, written in the last months of his life, resume some of the themes of the Confessions but in a more reflective way, and contain some passages of beautiful writing. His last months were spent in the country, at Ermenonville, where he died, apparently from an apoplectic stroke, at the age of sixty-six on 3 July 1778. There were reports that he had committed suicide, but these were unsubstantiated, and now appear to be without foundation. He was buried at Ermenonville as he desired. But sixteen years later his body was moved by the revolutionary Convention, and placed with Voltaire’s in the Panthéon, in Paris.

  Anyone anxious to read more about Jean-Jacques, and particularly about the social and political impact of his ideas, cannot do better than turn to Morley’s Life, a work which has not appreciably aged in the eighty years since it was written. An excellent, though slightly hostile, biography by C. E. Vulliamy (Geoffrey Bles, 1931) carefully examines the discrepancies between the Confessions and the probable facts of Rousseau’s life, and gives a reasonably rounded portrait of the man.

  I have used the text of the ‘Édition Jouaust’ for the translation, and compared it on occasions with the ‘Édition intégrale’, edited by Adrien van Bever (G. Crès et Cie, 1927). I have added the minimum of translator’s notes, only identifying the principal historical figures who are mentioned and pointing out the more flagrant errors of memory in Rousseau’s story. These notes are printed in square brackets. The rest, when not referring to points of translation, are additional comments by Jean-Jacques himself.

  J. M. C.

  Spring 1952

  THE

  First Part

  BOOK ONE

  1712–1719 I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.

  Simply myself. I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different. Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me, is a question which can only be resolved after the reading of my book.

  Let the last trump sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: ‘Here is what I have done, and if by chance I have used some immaterial embellishment it has been only to fill a void due to a defect of memory. I may have taken for fact what was no more than probability, but I have never put down as true what I knew to be false. I have displayed myself as I was, as vile and despicable when my behaviour was such, as good, generous, and noble when I was so. I have bared my secret soul as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Being! So let the numberless legion of my fellow men gather round me, and hear my confessions. Let them groan at my depravities, and blush for my misdeeds. But let each one of them reveal his heart at the foot of Thy throne with equal sincerity, and may any man who dares, say “I was a better man than he.”’

  I was born at Geneva in 1712, the son of Isaac Rousseau, a citizen of that town, and Susanne Bernard, his wife. My father’s inheritance, being a fifteenth part only of a very small property which had been divided among as many children, was almost nothing, and he relied for his living entirely on his trade of watchmaker, at which he was very highly skilled. My mother was the daughter of a minister of religion and rather better-off. She had besides both intelligence and beauty, and my father had not found it easy to win her. Their love had begun almost with their birth; at eight or nine they would walk together every evening along La Treille, and at ten they were inseparable. Sympathy and mental affinity strengthened in them a feeling first formed by habit. Both, being affectionate and sensitive by nature, were only waiting for the moment when they would find similar qualities in another; or rather the moment was waiting for them, and both threw their affections at the first heart that opened t
o receive them. Fate, by appearing to oppose their passion, only strengthened it. Unable to obtain his mistress, the young lover ate out his heart with grief, and she counselled him to travel and forget her. He travelled in vain, and returned more in love than ever, to find her he loved still faithful and fond. After such a proof, it was inevitable that they should love one another for all their lives. They swore to do so, and Heaven smiled on their vows.

  Gabriel Bernard, one of my mother’s brothers, fell in love with one of my father’s sisters, and she refused to marry him unless her brother could marry my mother at the same time. Love overcame all obstacles, and the two pairs were wedded on the same day. So it was that my uncle married my aunt, and their children became my double first cousins. Within a year both couples had a child, but at the end of that time each of them was forced to separate.

  My uncle Bernard, who was an engineer, went to serve in the Empire and Hungary under Prince Eugène, and distinguished himself at the siege and battle of Belgrade. My father, after the birth of my only brother, left for Constantinople, where he had been called to become watchmaker to the Sultan’s Seraglio. While he was away my mother’s beauty, wit, and talents* brought her admirers, one of the most pressing of whom was M. de la Closure, the French Resident in the city. His feelings must have been very strong, for thirty years later I have seen him moved when merely speaking to me about her. But my mother had more than her virtue with which to defend herself; she deeply loved my father, and urged him to come back. He threw up everything to do so, and I was the unhappy fruit of his return. For ten months later I was born, a poor and sickly child, and cost my mother her life. So my birth was the first of my misfortunes.

  I never knew how my father stood up to his loss, but I know that he never got over it. He seemed to see her again in me, but could never forget that I had robbed him of her; he never kissed me that I did not know by his sighs and his convulsive embrace that there was a bitter grief mingled with his affection, a grief which nevertheless intensified his feeling for me. When he said to me, ‘Jean-Jacques, let us talk of your mother,’ I would reply: ‘Very well, father, but we are sure to cry.’ ‘Ah,’ he would say with a groan; ‘Give her back to me, console me for her, fill the void she has left in my heart! Should I love you so if you were not more to me than a son?’ Forty years after he lost her he died in the arms of a second wife, but with his first wife’s name on his lips, and her picture imprinted upon his heart.

  Such were my parents. And of all the gifts with which Heaven endowed them, they left me but one, a sensitive heart. It had been the making of their happiness, but for me it has been the cause of all the misfortunes in my life.

  I was almost born dead, and they had little hope of saving me. I brought with me the seed of a disorder which has grown stronger with the years, and now gives me only occasional intervals of relief in which to suffer more painfully in some other way. But one of my father’s sisters, a nice sensible woman, bestowed such care on me that I survived; and now, as I write this, she is still alive at the age of eighty, nursing a husband rather younger than herself but ruined by drink. My dear aunt, I pardon you for causing me to live, and I deeply regret that I cannot repay you in the evening of your days all the care and affection you lavished on me at the dawn of mine. My nurse Jacqueline is still alive too, and healthy and strong. Indeed the fingers that opened my eyes at birth may well close them at my death.

  I felt before I thought: which is the common lot of man, though more pronounced in my case than in another’s. I know nothing of myself till I was five or six. I do not know how I learnt to read. I only remember my first books and their effect upon me; it is from my earliest reading that I date the unbroken consciousness of my own existence. My mother had possessed some novels, and my father and I began to read them after our supper. At first it was only to give me some practice in reading. But soon my interest in this entertaining literature became so strong that we read by turns continuously, and spent whole nights so engaged. For we could never leave off till the end of the book. Sometimes my father would say with shame as we heard the morning larks: ‘Come, let us go to bed. I am more of a child than you are.’

  In a short time I acquired by this dangerous method, not only an extreme facility in reading and expressing myself, but a singular insight for my age into the passions. I had no idea of the facts, but I was already familiar with every feeling. I had grasped nothing; I had sensed everything. These confused emotions which I experienced one after another, did not warp my reasoning powers in any way, for as yet I had none. But they shaped them after a special pattern, giving me the strangest and most romantic notions about human life, which neither experience nor reflection has ever succeeded in curing me of.

  1719–1723 The novels gave out in the summer of 1719, and that winter we changed our reading. Having exhausted my mother’s library, we turned to that portion of her father’s which had fallen to us. Fortunately it contained some good books, as it could hardly fail to do, for the collection had been formed by a minister, who deserved the title, a man of learning, after the fashion of his day, but of taste and good sense as well. Lesueur’s History of Church and Empire, Bossuet’s Discourse upon Universal History, Plutarch’s Lives, Nani’s History of Venice, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, La Bruyère, Fontenelle’s Worlds and his Dialogues with the Dead, and some volumes of Molière were transported to my father’s workshop, where I read them to him every day while he worked.

  Thus I acquired a sound taste, which was perhaps unique for my years. Plutarch, of them all, was my especial favourite, and the pleasure I took in reading and re-reading him did something to cure me of my passion for novels. Soon indeed I came to prefer Agesilaus, Brutus, and Aristides to Orondates, Artamenes, and Juba. It was this enthralling reading, and the discussions it gave rise to between my father and myself, that created in me that proud and intractable spirit, that impatience with the yoke of servitude, which has afflicted me throughout my life, in those situations least fitted to afford it scope. Continuously preoccupied with Rome and Athens, living as one might say with their great men, myself born the citizen of a republic and the son of a father whose patriotism was his strongest passion, I took fire by his example and pictured myself as a Greek or a Roman. I became indeed that character whose life I was reading; the recital of his constancy or his daring deeds so carrying me away that my eyes sparkled and my voice rang. One day when I was reading the story of Scaevola over table, I frightened them all by putting out my hand and grasping a chafingdish in imitation of that hero.

  I had one brother seven years older than myself, who was learning my father’s trade. The extraordinary affection lavished upon me led to his being somewhat neglected, which I consider very wrong. Moreover his education had suffered by this neglect, and he was acquiring low habits even before he arrived at an age at which he could in fact indulge them. He was apprenticed to another master, with whom he took the same liberties as he had taken at home. I hardly ever saw him. Indeed, I can hardly say that I ever knew him, but I did not cease to love him dearly, and he loved me as well as a scoundrel can love. I remember once when my father was correcting him severely and angrily, throwing myself impetuously between them, and clasping my arms tightly around him. Thus I covered him with my body, and received the blows intended for him. So obstinately did I maintain my hold that, either as a result of my tearful cries or so as not to hurt me more than him, my father let him off his punishment. In the end my brother became so bad that he ran away and completely disappeared. We heard some time later that he was in Germany. But he did not write at all, and we had no more news of him after that. So it was that I became an only son.

  But if that poor lad’s upbringing was neglected, it was a different matter with his brother. No royal child could be more scrupulously cared for than I was in my early years. I was idolized by everyone around me and, what is rarer, always treated as a beloved son, never as a spoiled child. Never once, until I left my father’s house, was I allowed to run out a
lone into the road with the other children. They never had to repress or to indulge in me any of those wayward humours that are usually attributed to Nature, but which are all the product of education alone. I had the faults of my years. I was a chatterer, I was greedy, and sometimes I lied. I would have stolen fruit or sweets or any kind of eatable; but I never took delight in being naughty or destructive, or in accusing other people or torturing poor animals. However, I do remember once having made water in one of our neighbour’s cooking-pots while she was at church; her name was Mme Clot. I will even admit that the thought of it still makes me laugh, because Mme Clot, although a good woman on the whole, was the grumpiest old body I have ever met. And that is a brief and truthful account of all my childish misdeeds.

  How could I have turned out wicked when I had nothing but examples of kindliness before my eyes, none but the best people in the world around me? My father, my aunt, my nurse, our friends and relations and everyone near me, may not have done my every bidding, but they did love me, and I loved them in return. My desires were so rarely excited and so rarely thwarted, that it never came into my head to have any. I could swear indeed that until I was put under a master I did not so much as know what it was to want my own way. When I was not reading or writing with my father, or going out for walks with my nurse, I spent all my time with my aunt, watching her embroider, hearing her sing, always sitting or standing beside her; and I was happy. Her cheerfulness and kindness and her pleasant face have left such an impression upon me that I can still remember her manner, her attitude and the way she looked. I recall too her affectionate little remarks, and I could still describe her clothes and her headdress, not forgetting the two curls of black hair she combed over her temples in the fashion of the day.