Rousseau's Dog by David Edmonds Read Free Book Online Page A

Geneva, Zurich, and Basel. But the Council of Bern promptly followed Geneva’s lead. On July 1, 1762, a session of the Bernese Senate resolved both to forbid the sale of
Émile
and to expel the author from the republic. He was given fifteen days to leave. Behind this decree lay the hand of the Paris parlement. The parlement had exercised its influence before: at its behest, in 1758, the government of Berne ordered all the impressions of Helvétius’s
Of the Spirit
and of Voltaire’s
Maiden
to be seized for burning. The Bernese were capable of ironic resistance. On this occasion, the officer of justice came into the council to report: “Your magnificences, after all possible searches, throughout the town we have been able to find only a little spirit and not one maiden.”
    On July 10, 1762, Rousseau moved north to the village of Môtiers. The village sits above the lake at the bottom of the Val de Travers, a wide valley between the gorges of the Jura and Lake Neuchâtel, and midway between Yverdon and the fortress city from which the lake takes its name. Home was to be a run-down dwelling owned by the niece of an old friend. Ever sensitive to his independence, Rousseau insisted on paying rent. Le Vasseur soon joined him.
    Understandably, Rousseau remained on his guard. At the end of July, he wrote to Mme de Boufflers about the turbulent local priests: “They behold me with horror; it is with great reluctance that they suffer me to enter their temples.” He accused “the poet Voltaire” and “the juggler” (trickster) Tronchin of rousing the priests. He was waiting to hear from the king of Prussia about asylum in Môtiers, he added.
    By a quirk of dynastic fate, the territory of Neuchâtel was under the jurisdiction of Prussia, whose ruler, Frederick the Great, was the highest ranking of Rousseau’s admirers. In addition to being a brilliant military strategist, Frederick was a connoisseur of the arts and a patron of the Enlightenment, his application of Enlightenment principles to government earning him the accolade of “philosopher king” and the censure of “enlightened despot.” (Like Rousseau, he was also a pet lover: when his favorite dog was ill, he summoned ten doctors.) He had appointed a Jacobite exile as Neuchâtel’s governor, the hereditary earl marshal of Scotland, George Keith, Earl Marischal. Portraits of the earl show a thin, long, drawn face and an aquiline nose.
    The earl had fled Scotland as a youth after joining the Jacobite uprising of 1715; he then took part in the Jacobite-Spanish landing on the west coast in 1719. Following that fiasco, in which he was badly wounded, he was tried in absentia and outlawed. He entered Frederick’s service, becoming ambassador to France and to Spain. The king also bestowed on him the Neuchâtel governorship, which became a none-too-arduous retirement post. Marischal was pardoned by George II in 1759, but though he visited Scotland and bought back one of his former estates, he could not feel at home. The septuagenarian earl—”his opinions were as tolerant as his nature was kind”—became a father figure for Rousseau, who was a regular guest at his château, calling the governor
mon père,
and being addressed back as
mon fils,
or “my son the savage.”
    In requesting asylum, Rousseau showed both confidence in his standing and trust in the graciousness of despots. Earlier, he had been critical of Frederick the Great, but, according to Marischal, Frederick thought it wrong “that a man of an irreproachable life is to be persecuted because his sentiments are singular.” The king proffered wine, corn, and firewood, believing Rousseau would accept gifts in kind more readily than money. He also wanted to build him a hermitage with a little garden. Rousseau said no: he would rathereat grass and grub up roots than accept a morsel of bread that he had not