II. those who destroy the altar will find it difficult to uphold the throne; and a native-born genius soon appeared, who carried into the theory of government the principles which the apostle of deism had arrayed only against the truths of Christianity. JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, a humble watchmaker's son in Geneva, was born on the 28th June 1712; and the throne of Louis XIV. crumbled under his strokes. Like Voltaire, his character is portrayed in the history of his private life. Endowed by nature with an ardent imagination, a boundless fancy, and susceptible feelings; awkward in manner, and at the same time vain in thought; shy, but yet ambitious; diffident, but not ignorant of his powers ;-he spent his early years in dreaming over romances, or devouring Plutarch's Lives; and was sometimes seduced, according to his own admission, into discreditable and criminal actions. He early wandered from his father's home, and was sheltered, while yet a boy, by Madame Warens, a benevolent old Catholic lady at Anneci, who was so shocked with the laxity of his religious principles that she sent him to a monastery at Turin to correct his opinions. He was too glad to escape from its rigid austerities, by entering the service of the Countess of Vercelli as a laquais, where he committed a theft, and had the baseness, on his own admission, to charge with it a young female fellow-servant who was entirely innocent of the offence. Dismissed from his situation for this affair, he entered into the employment of another noble family in Turin; but, soon disgusted with the drudgeries of domestic service, he fled to the house of Madame Warens, whose kindness had rescued him from destitution when a boy, and by whom he was again sheltered in misfortune. Madame Warens boarded him with the musicmaster of the cathedral, whom he accompanied at her Confessions, desire to Lyons ;1 but the latter having been seized with a Biog. Univ. fit of epilepsy, which made him fall down in the street, 127. Rousseau seized the opportunity to take to flight, and shake himself clear of the burden, leaving the unhappy 1 Rousseau, Par. i. 1, 3. xxxix. 126, wretch, as he himself has told us, "deserted by the only CHAP. friend he could rely on in the world." II. 49. irregulari This disgraceful inhumanity met with its appropriate reward. Rousseau, on returning to Anneci, found Madame Criminal Warens from home; her domestics could not tell what ties of his youth. route she had taken, and he was obliged to wander away destitute and unbefriended, as he had left his unhappy master on the streets of Lyons. He reached Lausanne, hardly knowing where he was going, and there and at Neufchatel earned a precarious subsistence for some time by teaching music, in which he was himself, at that time, very superficially instructed. Thence he visited Paris; but, finding himself immersed in an inferior society, he returned to Anneci, where Madame Warens again sheltered him, and his increasing passion for music made him take to teaching that art as a profession. Impetuous in all his designs, however, he could not rest in that employment; he fled, with extravagant passion, to games of hazard, and nearly killed himself by the vehemence with which, during some months, he devoted himself to those exciting pursuits. The study of Latin, of geometry, astronomy, and medicine, afterwards absorbed him, each for a few months of intense labour; and such was his facility in acquiring knowledge, that in that short period he obtained an extraordinary degree of proficiency in those different branches of information. Volumes would be required to recount all the follies and vices of this extraordinary man : suffice it to say, that at one period he was a preceptor for some months in the family of the brother of the celebrated Abbé de Mably, who was grand-provost of Lyons, where, neglecting the duties of his station, he spent his time, while dreaming over romances, alternately in drinking the delicious wine which he had stolen from the provost's cellars, and in making love to his wife; while at another, he conceived a passionate attachment for a vulgar young woman of the name of Theresa, whom he met when she was acting as a servant in an obscure inn at Paris, and II. CHAP. who, during more than thirty years, exercised a tyrannical sway over his mind. She soon made him a father-but Rousseau sent his son to the foundling hospital, having first taken the precaution to efface all marks by which he could ever be recognised; and he was so pleased with this expeditious mode of ridding himself of the burden of maintaining his family, that he continued it through life. The author of so many eloquent declamations against the unnatural feelings of mothers who do not nurse their offspring, had the disgrace of sending five of his own children Biog. Univ. to the foundling hospital, with such precautions against their ever being recognised that he never could or did hear of them again.1* xxxix. 129, 131. 50. His first essay in literature. Despite all these disgraceful acts of selfishness and turpitude, the genius of Rousseau was such that it broke through all obstacles, and raised him to the highest pinnacle of literary glory. His first essay in the career in which he ultimately acquired such celebrity, was at once characteristic of the turn of his mind, and decisive as to the future tendency of his writings. It was an essay for a prize proposed by the Academy of Sciences at Dijon, on the question" Have the arts and sciences contributed to the corruption or purification of morals?" He undertook to compete, by the advice of Diderot; boldly supported the side that they had contributed only to the progress of corruption, and carried off the prize. From that moment his fate was fixed: he determined, as he himself has told Lac. Hist. us, "to break at once with the whole maxims of his age."+ de France, Such, however, was the ardour of his passion for music, Biog. Univ. that his next essay was an opera, Le Devin du Village; 133. the simple and pathetic language of which charmed the court, and obtained unqualified success.2 So entirely arti iii. 102, 105. xxxix. 131, * It augments the indignation which all must feel at this heartless, unnatural conduct on the part of Rousseau, that the three last children whom he thus abandoned were born when he was in circumstances which, compared with those of his previous life, were affluence.-Biog. Univ. xxxix. 132. + "De rompre brusquement en visière aux maximes de son siècle."-Confessions, ii. 124; Biographie Universelle, xxxix. 132. II. ficial had manners and ideas become in the French capital, CHAP. that the imagery and language of nature came upon its inhabitants with the charm of novelty: the feelings of rural life were as unknown to them as the music of the spheres. 51. ness towards His literary success neither improved his principles nor softened his heart. He passed soon after by Chambery, Heartlesswhere he visited Madame Warens, who had been a second Madame mother to him during his youth and distress: he found Warens. her so reduced in her circumstances, by subsequent imprudence and misfortune, that he hardly knew her amidst the desolation with which she was surrounded. He hastened from the scene, and left scarcely any succour to her who had been so generous to him in his own evil days. He had even the barbarity to look, in the midst of her afflictions, to her little succession, and tell her that he expected to inherit a black dress which had caught his fancy. At Geneva, whither he repaired after leaving Madame Warens, his head was turned, on his own admission, by the republican ardour of which that little state was the theatre, and he had some thoughts of settling in its vicinity for life-a design from which, however, he was turned aside by the jealousy he felt at Voltaire, who had recently established himself with seignorial splendour at Ferney, in the neighbourhood of that city. He returned sions, p. 1, in consequence to Paris, and took refuge with Madame xiii.329, and d'Epinay, who received him readily, in the house since so 1817. well known under the name of the Hermitage, in the valley of Montmorency.1 1 Confes 15. Euvres, 345, Edit. ings, and There his principal works, the Contrat Social, and 52. Nouvelle Héloïse, were written; but having fallen despe- His subserately in love with the Countess d'Houdelot, sister-in-law quent writto Madame d'Epinay, and mistress to the Marquis St death. Lambert, who received his passion with disdain, he quarrelled with his benefactress, and after a variety of discreditable adventures, found shelter in an apartment of the chateau of Montmorency, from the kindness of the Duke II. CHAP. of Luxembourg; and soon after his greatest work, Emile, appeared. He was now past fifty, but so little had his numerous repulses in love checked his vanity that he again conceived a ridiculous passion for a lady of fashion, the Countess Boufflers; indeed, so unconscious was he at this period of the awkwardness of his manner, that he openly avowed, in his correspondence, that he thought no woman, even of the highest rank, could resist him. * All these weaknesses are revealed in his Confessions, from which principally the preceding detail has been taken—a sure proof that he had repented of none of them, for no man confesses a fault of which he is really ashamed. Subsequently he retired to Neufchatel, and soon after took up his abode in a cottage in the little island of St Pierre, in the middle of the beautiful lake of Bienne: but an order of the Senate of Berne at length compelled him to leave that charming retreat. He then married Theresa Levasii. 1, 9, 12. seur, after twenty-three years of irregular connexion, and Biog. Univ. xxxix 141, of rude despotism on her part. At length he expired iii. 102, 112. suddenly at Ermenonville, on the 3d July 1778, not without suspicions of having hastened his end by poison.1 1 Confessions, Part 144. Lac. 53. character. From a life so irregular, and in many periods so disHis literary graceful, no fixed principle or firmness of mind could be expected; and yet such was Rousseau's genius that it may be doubted whether any author ever produced so great an impression, both upon his own age and that which succeeded him. His writings, more even than Voltaire's, brought about the French Revolution. He followed up and applied to social life what that great philosopher directed only against the institutions of religion. It was to their entire novelty, and the entrancing eloquence of * "Il y a peu des femmes, même dans le haut rang, dont je n'eusse fait la conquête, si je l'avais entreprise."-See Biographie Universelle, xxxix. 136. It is a curious circumstance that Abelard, the Rousseau of the twelfth century, and whose doctrines on the Natural Innocence of Man very closely resembled those of the Philosopher of Meilleraie, said just the same "J'en étais venu au point, dit-il, que quelque femme que j'honorasse de mon amour, je n'avais à craindre aucun refus."-ABELARD, Liber Calam. Mearum, p. 40; and MICHELET, Histoire de France, ii. 290. |