She looked down, blew a strong jet of smoke away to her left.
“But you’re a married man. You’ve got two kids—”
“Four. Now.”
“Jesus! Four?”
“Sonia had twins three weeks ago.”
“My God. Well, there you are.… It’s useless. We shouldn’t even be talking about it. I should never have called.”
She continued listing objections. I felt short of oxygen, like Duric Lodokian. I was breathing through mouth and nose but my lungs still felt starved of air. I had to divert her from the wife-and-children topic. She paused to take off her hat.
“See, I kept it blond. Memories of Julie.”
The idea seemed to fly up in my face, like a game bird started from heather.
“I was going to get in touch anyway,” I said slowly. “I want you to be in my new film. With Karl-Heinz again.”
“Oh yes. I read about it. But what part is there for me?”
“Someone called Madame de Warens.”
“I don’t know.…”
“You’d be wonderful.”
“I don’t think it’s such a good idea. What’s the film called again?”
“The Confessions.”
VILLA LUXE, June 22, 1972
Emilia has been acting strangely, lately. It’s all to do with that hole in the shutter, I’m sure. One day she was taciturn. Then yesterday she came wearing lipstick and some unattractive wooden earrings. I sense too that she doesn’t like Ulrike. It’s curious how women can become so proprietorial. I told her Ulrike had permission to use the beach. She was clearly irritated by this. I can’t be bothered trying to work out what’s going on. Could it be — however absurd it sounds — that she’s jealous? My God.…
It’s time I told you something of Jean Jacques Rousseau, for those of you unfamiliar with him. First I will give you the public image, the official version, one we can swiftly forget. Unfortunately my library here is impoverished. I can only quote from A Students’ Guide to European Philosophy by one Dr. Ida Milby-Low (M.A., D. Phil., Oxford), published in 1934. I apologize, but this is the mere husk of the man we are interested in. Bear with me.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was born in Geneva on June 28, 1712. His father was a watchmender [a watchmaker, in fact] and his mother died immediately after his birth. He received no regular education, but such as he had in the formative years of his life was augmented by a reading of French novels kept in his father’s library. In Rousseau’s infancy his father was obliged to quit Geneva as a consequence of a quarrel and the young Jean Jacques was placed first in the care of a country parson and subsequently an uncle. After a turbulent adolescence he was apprenticed to an engraver, who attempted vainly to discipline him. Deeply unhappy, Rousseau made his escape from this employer and fled from Switzerland to Annecy in Savoy, where he shortly made the acquaintance of one Mme. de Warens, a woman of facile morals [this is the voice of Miss Milby-Low — spinster don, I predict, with a moustache, and whose sole vices are a rare cigarette and a secret tipple from that sherry bottle in her desk drawer].
Mme. de Warens directed Rousseau to Turin, where he was converted to Roman Catholicism and was employed as a domestic servant by two prosperous aristocratic families. He might have risen to become the steward of one of these households had not his perennial instability caused him to run away again. He fled his responsibilities once more, back to Annecy and Mme. de Warens, who became, in Rousseau’s own parlance, his “Maman.”
There now followed a succession of temporary employments and wanderings. Rousseau took up music as his main career and worked intermittently as a chorister. He even composed an opera during this uncertain period of fleeting attachments to adventurers, which took him to Lausanne and Paris. Each time he returned inevitably to Mme. de Warens whom he had lived with first at Chambéry and then at Les Charmettes, a charming country house nearby. Rousseau continued his education here, in a period of some tranquillity, through a self-imposed course of various indiscriminate reading. Emotionally, however, his life was less calm. Mme. de Warens had introduced into her household a man named Witzenreid. Rousseau found himself unable to share his “Maman” with another and left Les Charmettes to take up work as an itinerant tutor. He had written little by this stage of his life and was quite unconscious of his genius.
In 1742 he decided to try and make his fortune in Paris on the strength of a new system of musical notation that he had devised. This was never popular and Rousseau remained ignored. In 1744 he took up with one Thérèse le Vasseur, an ignorant girl of low class [the voice of the senior common room again] who became the mother of his children.
Rousseau earned his living by copying music, secretarial work and the very limited success of his operatic comedies. In 1749, Diderot (q.v.) invited him to contribute to the French Encyclopedia (q.v.), wherein Rousseau wrote the articles on music and political economy. Thus he was drawn into the society of French intellectuals such as d’Alembert and F. M. Grimm, a German of gross impiety.
The first thirty-eight years of Rousseau’s life were passed in almost total obscurity. He occupied a succession of menial jobs and probably would have been content to remain with the encyclopédistes’ claque (who contrived to find the amiable civilization of monarchical France too despotic for their taste) had he not emerged as a figure of fame and renown with his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. In this he asserted — with improbable eloquence obscuring the unlikely paradox — that man is happier in a savage natural state than in an advanced civilized one. He became the toast of Paris and his Discourse proved to be the passport he sought to high society. [He did not seek this.]
In the meantime Thérèse le Vasseur had borne him five children, all of whom, and with no qualms, Rousseau had abandoned in succession at the door of the foundling hospital in Paris.
Fame and its trappings, however, consorted uneasily with the man who had enjoined the “noble savage” as an exemplary model for mankind. Rousseau returned to Geneva in 1754, promptly renounced his Catholicism and became a Calvinist and a citizen once more. His retreat did not last long. Society and its rich patrons proved to be too strong an allure and Rousseau accepted the offer of Mme. d’Épinay to occupy the Hermitage, a pleasant cottage on her estate in the forest of Montmorency. The peace and quiet of the countryside delighted him, but it was not too last. Mme. d’Épinay desired his company; Diderot and Grimm besought him to return to the salons of Paris; and then Rousseau fell in love with Mme. d’Épinay’s sister, the Comtesse d’Houdetot, who was mistress of the noble soldier-poet Saint-Lambert. This led first to complications, then to tension and recrimination, concluding in bitter acrimony among the participants.
With surprising ease Rousseau found another patron, the Maréchal de Luxembourg. Upon him now fell the honour of providing the philosopher and his doxy with a home [this is academic bitchery at its worst]. But new heights of celebrity awaited Rousseau. Within a period of eighteen months (1761–62) three large works were published: The New Héloïse, Émile and The Social Contract They presented revolutionary views on all the topics most vital to humanity and society: government, education, religion, sexual morality, family life, the source of our deep emotions and love.
This was Rousseau’s annus mirabilis but, as so often with the man, it brought only disaster in its train. Unorthodox views of religion expounded in Emile (a treatise of education in the form of a novel) offended the authorities. The book was condemned and a warrant was issued for its author’s arrest. Rousseau, however, was given every opportunity to escape and he proceeded quickly to Switzerland. But he was no longer welcome there and so moved to Neuchâtel, then Prussian territory. He lived quietly there in rural seclusion, began writing his Confessions and received occasional visitors, among whom was the young Scotsman James Boswell, later biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson (q.v.).