fulfil it as much as isin me. But, in this idleness of body, my soul is Still aGtive; it Still produces sentiments 39 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY and thoughts, and its inner and moral life seems to be increased by the death of every earthly and temporal interest. My body is nothing to me but an embarrass- ment, but an obstacle, and I shall in advance disengage myself from it as much as I can.
A situation so singular as this deserves assuredly to be examined and described, and it is to this examina- tion that I have devoted my last leisure. To do it with success, it is necessary to proceed with order and method; but I am incapable of this labour, and it would even remove me from my goal, which is to render an account to myself of the modifications of my soul and of their successions, I shall carry out upon myself to a certain extent the operations which the physicists make upon the air, to understand its daily state, I shall apply the barometer to my soul, and these operations well directed and for long repeated will furnish me with results as sure as those of science. But I shall not extend my enterprise so far. I shall content myself with keeping a register of my operations, without seek- ing to reduce them into system, I shall carry out the same enterprise as Montaigne, but with a goal entirely contrary to his, because he did not write his Essays except for others, and I do not write my reveries except for myself. If, in my extreme age, at the approach of death, I remain, as I hope, in the same mood as I am now, the reading of my reveries will recall to me the pleasure that I tasted in writing them, and thus making reborn for me times gone by, will, so to say, 40 FIRST PROMENADE redouble my existence. In spite of men I shall Sill enjoy the charm of society, and I shall live decrepit with myself in another age, as if I were living with a younger © friend, I wrote my “Confessions” and my “Dialogues” in a continual anxiety about the means of snatching them from the rapacious hands of my persecutors, in order to transmit them, if it were possible, to other generations. The same disquiet does not torment me any more as regards this work; I know it will be useless; and the desire of being better known among men having been extinguished in my heart leaves nothing but a profound indifference to the lot both of my true writings and of the testimonies to my innocence, which already perhaps have been all destroyed for ever. Let them spy upon what I am doing, let them worry themselves about these leaves, let them seize upon them, suppress them, falsify them, everything is the same to me hence- forward. 1 do not hide or display them. If they are taken away from me in my lifetime, I cannot be robbed of the pleasure of having written them, nor of the memory of their contents, nor of the solitary medita- tions of which they are the fruit and of which the source cannot be extinguished except with my soul. If, upon my first calamities, I had not turned against my destiny, and had taken up the position which I take to-day, all the efforts of men, all their frightful intrigues, would have been without effe& upon me, and they would not have troubled my repose by all their 4!
REVERIES OF A SOLITARY plots, any more than they can trouble it henceforward by all their successes. Let them rejoice to their hearts’ content at my disgrace, they will not prevent me from rejoicing in my innocence, and from ending my days in peace despite them all.
42 SECOND PROMENADE AVING, then, formed the projeét of describing the habitual state of my soul in the most strange position in which a mortal can ever find himself, I saw no way more simple and more sure of executing this enterprise than to make a faithful record of my solitary walks and of the reveries that fill them, when I leave my head entirely free and let my ideas follow their bent without resistance and without trouble. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones of the day in which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and where I can truly say I am that which nature has designed, I soon felt that I had delayed too long in executing this project. My imagination, already less alive, does not enkindle as before at the contemplation of the objeét which animates it; I am less drunken with the delirium of reverie; there is more of reminiscence than of creation in that which it now produces; the spirit of life is extinguished in me by degrees, my soul does not leap out any more except with a Struggle from its narrow envelope, and, lacking the hope of the State to which I aspire because I feel I have right to it, I do not exis now except in memories; so in order to 43 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY contemplate myself before my decline, it is necessary that I should go back at least some years to the time when, losing all hope here below and not finding more food for my heart upon earth, I accustomed myself little by little to nourish it with its own substance and to seek all its paSturage within myself.
This resource, of which I learned too late, became so fecund that it soon sufficed to compensate me for everything. The habit of entering into myself made me lose finally the feeling and even the remembrance of my evils. I learned thus by my own experience that the source of true happiness is in ourselves, and that it did not depend upon men to make miserable him who knows how to will to be happy. For four or five years, I tasted habitually these internal delights which loving and tender souls find in contemplation, These ravishments, these ecstasies, that I found some- times in walking thus alone, were enjoyments which I owed to my persecutors: without them, I could not have ever found nor known the treasures which I carried within myself. In the mids of so much richness, how keep a faithful regifter? In trying to recall to myself so many sweet reveries, ingtead of describing them I fell back into them again, Itis a State which the memory brings back and which one would soon cease to understand by ceasing entirely to feel.
T experienced this effect in the Promenades which followed the proje& of writing the sequel to my “Con- 44 SECOND PROMENADE fessions,” above all in one which I am about to speak of, and in which an unforeseen accident came to break the thread of my ideas and to give them for some time another diredtion, On Thursday, Oétober 24, 1776, after dinner I followed the boulevards up to the Rue du Chemin-Vert, by which I gained the heights of Ménilmontant; and from there, taking the paths across the vineyards and meadows, I followed as far as Charonne the smiling landscape which unites the two villages: then I made a détour to return to the same meadows, by taking another road, I amused myself by going over them with that pleasure and interest which agreeable sites have always given me, Stopping sometimes to identify plants in the grass, I perceived two which I see very rarely around Paris, and which I found very abundant in this digtri@. One is the Picris hieracoides of the composite group, and the other the Bupleurum falcatum of the umbelliferous family. This discovery delighted and amused me for a long time, and finished by that of a plant Sill more rare, especially in a high country, that is to say, the Cerastium aguaticum, which, despite the accident which befell me the same day, I found again in a book which I had in my pocket, and put into my herbarium.
Finally, after having gone over in detail many other plants which I saw still in flower, and whose aspect and classification which were familiar to me nevertheless still gave me pleasure, I quitted little 45 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY by little these slight observations in order to yield myself to the impression, not less agreeable, but more touch- ing, which the whole of the landscape made upon me. For some days the vintage had been harvested; the walkers from the city had already gone home, the peasants also were quitting the fields for the labour of the winter. The country, still green and smiling, but unleafed in part, and already almost desert, offered everywhere the image of solitude and of the approach of winter. There resulted from its aspect a mixed impression, sweet and sad, too analogous to my age and Jot that] should fail to make the application to myself, I saw myself at the decline of an innocentand unfortunate life; the soul Sill full of lively sentiments, and the spirit still ornamented with some flowers, but already withered by sadness and dried up in ennui, Alone and abandoned, I felt the chill of the first frosts, and my failing imagination did not people my solitude any more with beings formed according to my own heart. I said to myself with a sigh: What have I done here on earth? I was made for living, and I am dying, without having lived, At least this has not been my fault, and I shall carry back to the Author of my being, if not the offering of good works which men have not allowed to me, at least 2 host of good but frustrated intentions, of sentiments healthy but made of no effeét, and of a patience above the contempt of men, I grew tender at these reflections; I went over again the movements of my soul since youth, and during my 46 SECOND PROMENADE mature age, since I have been sequestered from the society of men, and during the Jong retreat in which I must finish my days. I went back with pleasure © over all the affections of my heart, over all its attachments, so tender, but so blind, over the ideas less sad than consoling, with which my spirit has been nourished for some years, and I prepared to recall these sufficiently to describe them with a pleasure almost equal to that which I had taken in yielding my- self to them. My afternoon passed in these peaceful meditations, and I was returning very content with my day, when, in the midst of my reverie, I was drawn out of it by the event which it remains for me to describe.
I was, about six o’clock, on the descent from Ménil- montant, almost face to face with the Galant Jardinier, when certain persons who were walking in front of me having been suddenly swept aside, I saw rushing towards me a great Danish dog, which flying at full speed in front of a carriage, had no time to check its speed or to turn aside when it perceived me. I judged that the sole means that I had to avoid being thrown down to earth was to make a great leap, so that the dog should pass under me while I was in the air, This idea, more swift than the lightning, and which T had not even the time to reason out or to execute, was the last before my accident. I did not feel the blow, nor the fall, nor anything of what followed, up to the moment when I came to myself.
47 47 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY It was almost night when I came back to conscious- ness. I found myself between the arms of three or four young people who told me what had happened. The Danish dog, not having been able to check its onrush, was precipitated upon my two legs, and Striking me with its body and its speed, made me fall head foremost; the upper jaw, bearing the whole weight of my body, struck upon a very hard pavement, and the fall was the more violent because, the road being down- hill, my head was thrown down lower than my feet. The carriage to which the dog belonged followed immediately, and would have passed over my body if the coachman had not reined in his horses upon the instant, ‘That is what I learned from the recital of those who had picked me up and who held me still when I came to myself. The state in which I found myself in that instant was too singular not to make a descrip- tion of it here, The night was coming on. I perceived the sky, some Stars, anda little grass. This first sensation was a delicious moment. I did not feel anything except through them. I was born in that instant to life, and it seemed to me that I filled with my light existence all the objets which I perceived. Entirely given up to the present moment, I did not remember anything; T had no distiné notion of my individuality, not the least idea of what had happened to me; I did not know who I was nor where I was; I felt neither evil 48 SECOND PROMENADE nor fear, nor trouble. I saw my blood flowing as I might have looked at a brooklet, without dreaming even that this blood in any way belonged to me. I felt in the whole of my being a ravishing charm, to which, each time that I think of it, I find nothing comparable in the whole action of known pleasures.
They asked me where I lived: it was impossible for metosay. Iasked where I was; they said on the High Cliff; it was as if they said to me: on Mount Atlas, It was necessary for me to ask successively the country, the city, and the quarter where I was: Sill this did not suffice for me to recolleét myself; it was necessary for me to walk the whole distance from there to the highroad in order to recall my home and my name, A gentleman whom I do not know, and who had the charity to accompany me for a time, learning that I lived so far away, advised me to take a cab at the Temple to carry me back home. I walked quite well, very softly, without feeling either pain or wound, although I kept spitting blood. But I had an icy shiver which made my loose teeth rattle in a very un- comfortable way. Arrived at the Temple, I thought that, because I walked without trouble, it was better worth while to continue my route, on foot, than to expose myself to perishing of cold in a cab. I thus covered the half-a-league which lay between the Temple to the Rue Platiére, walking without trouble, avoiding the obétruétions, the carriages, choosing and following my road as well as I could have done in full REVERIES OF A SOLITARY health. J arrived; I opened the lock which had been put upon the Street-door, I went up the stairway in darkness, and I finally entered my house without other accident than my fall and its sequels, of which I did not feel anything even then.
The cries of my wife upon seeing me made me under- Stand that I had been more injured than I supposed. I passed the night without understanding or feeling my accident. This is what I felt and found in the morning. I had the upper lip split inside up to the nose; on the outside the skin had preserved it better, and prevented the total separation; four teeth were bent back in the upper jaw, the whole of that part of the face which covered it extremely swollen and bruised, the right thumb sprained and very swollen, the left thumb severely cut, the right arm sprained, the left knee also very swollen, while a Strong and painful contusion forbade me totally to bend it. But, with all this fracas, nothing broken, not even a tooth; a good fortune which seemed almost a miracle in 2 fall like that.
This is faithfully the Story of my accident. In a few days this Story was spread about Paris, so changed and disfigured, that it was impossible to recognise any- thing of it. I should have counted in advance upon this metamorphosis; but there were joined to it so many bizarre circumstances, so many obscure remarks and reticences accompanied it; people spoke to me about it with an air so smilingly discreet, that all these mysteries disquieted me. I have always hated dark 50 SECOND PROMENADE secrets; they inspire me naturally with a horror which those with which men have surrounded me for so many years have not been able to diminish. Amid all the singularities of this epoch I took notice of but one, which is sufficient to form an estimate of the others.
M——,, with whom I have never had any relation, sent his secretary to enquire the news of me, and to make me pressing offers of services which did not appear to me, under the circumstances, of much use for my recovery. His secretary did not cease to press me very Strongly to make use of his offers, going so far as to say that if I did not trust him, I could write dire@ly to M. This great eagerness and the air of confi- dence which was joined to it, made me understand that there was underneath it some mystery which I sought vainly to penetrate, It did not take much to frighten me; above all, in the State of agitation which my accident, and the fever added to it, had put my head. T yielded myself up to a thousand uneasy and sad con- jectures, and all that happened about me caused me to make remarks which revealed rather the delirium of fever than the cool head of a man who does not take any interest in anything.
Another event came to complete the disturbance of my tranquillity. Madame X. had sought me for some years, without my being able to divine why. A great number of small presents, and frequent visits, without object and without pleasure, showed me a secret aim in all this, but did not tell me what it was. She spoke ofa gt REVERIES OF A SOLITARY romance which she wished to write, in order to present it to the Queen. I said what I thought of women authors. She gave me to understand that this projeét had as its obje& the re-establishment of her fortune, for which she needed prote@tion: I had nothing to reply to that. She said afterwards that, not having been able to obtain access to the Queen, she had determined to give her book to the public. There was no reason to give her advice which she did not ask of me, and which she would not have followed. She spoke of showing me the manuscript beforehand. I begged her to do nothing of the sort, and she did nothing, One fine day, during my convalescence, I received from her this book printed, and even bound, and I saw in its preface such gross praises of me, so badly displayed and done with such affeCtation, that I was disagreeably surprised. Coarse flattery which makes itself felt, never is allied with benevolence: my heart could never be deceived on that score, Some days afterwards, Madame X. came to see me with her daughter. She told me that her book was making a great stir on account of a note which had attra€ted attention to it; I had scarcely observed this note on rapidly going over the romance. I reread it after the departure of Madame X.; I examined the turn of phrase; I believed that I had found the motive of her visits, of her flatteries, of the gross overpraise of her preface; and I judged that all this had no other reason than to dispose the public to attribute to me the §2 SECOND PROMENADE note, and in consequence attraét the censure that it might draw down upon its author under the circum-, Stances in which it was published.
I had no means of destroying this rumour and the impression it might make; and all that I could do was not to support it by suffering the continuation of the vain and showy visits of Madame X. and of her daughter, To obtain this result, here is the note I wrote the mother: “ Rousseau, not receiving any author in his house, thanks Madame X. for her kindness, and prays her not to honour him any more with her visits.”
She replied to me with a letter honest enough in form, but phrased like all those which people write to me under similar circumstances. I had barbarously thrust a dagger into her feeling heart, and I should realise, by the tone of her letter, that having sentiments so lively and so true for me, she would not endure this rupture without dying. It is true that direCtness and frankness in everything are frightful crimes in this world; and I appear to my contemporaries malicious and fierce, when I have shown no other crime in their eyes than not to be so false and perfidious as they.
I had already gone out many times, and I even walked frequently in the Tuileries, when I saw, from the astonishment of many of those who encountered me, that there was till, in regard to me, some other news that I did not know. I learned finally that the public rumour was that I was dead of my fall; and this rumour 53 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY spread so rapidly and so obéstinately, that more than fifteen days after I learned it, it was spoken of at the Court as a certain fa&. The Courier of Avignon, as someone took pains to write me, did not fail to anticipate on this occasion the tribute of outrages and indignities which were being prepared for my memory after death, in the form of a funeral oration.
This news was accompanied with a circumstance till more singular which I only learned by chance, and of which I have not been able to know any detail. It is that a subscription had been opened at the same time to print the manuscripts which might be found in my house, I understood by this that a collection of fabricated writings were being kept ready expressly for the purpose of attributing them to me after my death; because to think that anyone would print faith- fully any of those which would be aétually found, was a Stupidity which would not enter into the mind of a sensible man, and agains which fifteen years of experience have only too much warned me.
These observations, made étroke on stroke, and followed by many others which were scarcely less astounding, nevertheless Startled my imagination which I thought deadened; and these dark scandals, which were being reinforced without relaxation about me, reawakened all the horror they naturally inspired in me. I wearied myself in making a thousand ex- planations of all this, and in seeking to underétand the mysteries which had been made inexplicable for 5+ SECOND PROMENADE.
me. The one invariable result of all these riddles was the confirmation of my previous conclusions, that is, I knew that the destiny of my person and of my reputa- tion having been fixed by agreement by all the present generation, no effort on my part could enable me to escape them, because it was impossible for me to transmit any record to other ages without letting it pass through this age by means of hands interested in suppressing it, But this time I went further. The amassing of so many fortuitous circumstances, the elevation of all my most cruel enemies, led on, so to say, by fortune, all those who governed the State, all those who direéted public opinion, all the people in office, all the men in credit chosen from among the best of those who have some secret animosity againgt me, to act together in the common plot; this universal agreement was too extraordinary to be purely fortuitous, ts A single man who would have refused to be an” accomplice, a single event that might have been contrary to it, a single unforeseen circumstance that would have made an obstacle to the scheme, would have sufficed to make it fail. But all the wills, all the fatalities, fortune, and all the revolutions have Strengthened the work of men; and an agreement so striking, which appears a prodigy, could not let me doubt but that its full success was written in the eternal decrees. Multi- tudes of special observations, whether in the past or the present, have confirmed me so far in this opinion, 55 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY that I cannot prevent myself from regarding henceforth as one of the secrets of heaven, impenetrable to human reason, the same work which I did not envisage up to now except as the fruit of the maliciousness of men.
This idea, far from being cruel and heart-breaking to me, consoles me, tranquillises me, and aids me in resigning myself. I do not go so far as St. Augustine, who was consoled for being damned, if that were the will of God: my resignation comes from a source less disinterested, it is true, but not less pure, and more worthy, in my opinion, of the perfect Being that I adore.
God is just, He wills that I should suffer, and He knows that Iam innocent. ‘There is the motive of my confidence; my heart and my reason cry out that it will never deceive me. Let men and destiny do what they can; let us learn to suffer without complaint; all must in the end return to order, and my turn will come sooner or later, 56 THIRD PROMENADE GROW old while forever learning. Solon often repeated this verse in his old age. There is a sense in which I can also say it in mine; but it is a very sad knowledge, this, which experience has made me acquire for twenty years: ignorance is still preferable. Adversity without a doubtisa great master; but this maéter makes his lessons cost dearly, and often the profit one obtains from them is not worth the price one has paid. For the rest, before one has obtained all this acquisition by means of such tardy lessons, the correét time for using them has passed away. Youth is the time to study wisdom; old age is the time to practise it. Experience always instrudts, I admit: but it does not profit except for the space of time that one has before one.
Is it the time, at the moment when one has to die, to learn how one should have lived?
What avails knowledge so late and painfully ac- quired on my destiny, and on the passions of others, of which my destiny is the result? I have not learned to underStand men better except through feeling more keenly the misery into which they have plunged me; nor has this knowledge, though discovering all their snares, enabled me to avoid them. Why did I not remain 57 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY always in the Stupid but pleasing confidence which made me for so many years the prey and the plaything of my oftensible friends, while enveloped in all their plots I was without the least suspicion? I was their dupe and their victim, it is true; but I believed myself to be loved by them, and my heart rejoiced in the friend- ship which they had inspired in me, while attributing to them as much for myself. These sweet illusions are degtroyed. ‘The sad truth, that time and reason have unveiled to me, in making me feel my misfortune, has made me see that it is without remedy, and that there remains nothing for me but to resign myself. Thus all the experiences of my age are for me, in my State, without present utility and without profit for the future.
‘We enter into the Struggle at our birth, we go out of it upon our death. What does it serve to grasp how we can better manage our lives, when we are at the end of our career? There is nothing to think about, then, but how we will pass out of life. The Study of an old man, if there is anything Still for him to do, is solely to learn to die; and it is precisely this which one does least at my age: one thinks of everything except that. All old men hold more firmly to life than children, and go out of it with worse grace than young people. It is because, all their work having been for this life, they see at the end that they have lost their trouble. All their needs, all their goods, all the fruits of their laborious Struggles, they abandon when they pass 58 THIRD PROMENADE away. They have not dreamed of acquiring anything during their lives which they can carry away at their death.
I said all this when it was time to say it; and if I hive not better known how to obtain an advantage from my reflections, it was not for lack of making them in time, and of having well digested them. Thrown since my childhood into the whirlpool of the world, I learned in good time, by experience, that I was not made to live there, and that I should never attain to the state of which my heart felt the need. Ceasing then to seek among men the happiness which I felt I was unable to find there, my ardent imagination leapt already beyond the span of my life, hardly begun, as from a plot of ground that was Strange to me, to rest itself upon a tranquil position where I could settle myself.
This sentiment, fostered by education from my infancy, and reinforced throughout my life, by the long web of miseries and misfortunes that have filled it, has made me seek, at all times, to understand the nature and destiny of my being with more interest and care than I] have found in any other man. I have seen many who philosophised more learnedly than I, but their philosophy was, so to speak, foreign to them. Wishing to be more learned than others, they Studied the universe to know how it was arranged, as they might have studied some Strange machine which they had remarked, out of pure curiosity. They studied human nature to be able to speak of it wisely, but not to know 59 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY themselves; they worked to inStrué others, but not to enlighten themselves from within. Many of them did not wish anything but to write a book, it mattered not what, provided it was well received. When their own book was done and published, the contents did not interes them in any way, except to have what it said adopted by others, and to defend it in case it was attacked; but for the rest, without drawing anything for their own proper use therefrom, without worrying whether this content was false or true, provided it was not refuted. For myself, when I desired to learn any- thing, it was to know myself and not to teach; I have always believed that before instructing others, it was necessary to begin by knowing enough for oneself; and of all the Studies that I have attempted to make in my life in the midst of men, there is scarcely one that I might not have made equally alone on a desert island where I might have been confined for the rest of my days. That which we should do depends much on that which we should believe; and in all that does not depend upon the first needs of nature, our opinions are the guide of our ations. On this principle, which was always mine, I have sought often and long to understand the true end of life in order to dire& the occupation of my own, and I was soon consoled for my small aptitude for guiding myself skilfully through the world, by feeling that it is not necessary to seek this aim.