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A Place in the Country by WG Sebald – extract A Place in the Country by WG Sebald – extract
(5 months later)
At the end of September 1965, having moved to the French-speaking part of Switzerland to continue my studies, a few days before the beginning of the semester I took a trip to the nearby Seeland, where, starting from Ins, I climbed up the so-called Schattenrain. It was a hazy sort of day, and I remember how, on reaching the edge of the small wood covering the slope, I paused to look back down at the path I had come by, at the plain stretching away to the north crisscrossed by the straight lines of canals, with the hills shrouded in mist beyond; and how, when I emerged once more into the fields above the village of Lüscherz, I saw spread out below me the Lac de Bienne, and sat there for an hour or more lost in thought at the sight, resolving that at the earliest opportunity I would cross over to the island in the lake which, on that autumn day, was flooded with a trembling pale light. As so often happens in life, however, it took another 31 years before this plan could be realised and I was finally able, in the early summer of 1996, in the company of an exceedingly obliging host who lived high above the steep shores of the lake and who habitually wore a kind of captain's cap, smoked Indian bidis and seldom spoke, to make the journey across the lake from the city of Bienne to the island of Saint-Pierre, formed during the last ice age by the retreating Rhône glacier into the shape of a whale's back – or so it is generally said. The ship which took us along the edge of the Jura massif where it plunges steeply into the lake was called the Ville de Fribourg. Among the other passengers on board were the gaudily attired members of a male voice choir, who several times during the short crossing struck up from the stern a chorus of "Làhaut sur la montagne, Les jours s'en vont" or another such Swiss refrain, with the sole intention, or so it seemed to me, of reminding me, with the curiously strained, guttural notes their ensemble produced, of how far I had come meanwhile from my place of origin.At the end of September 1965, having moved to the French-speaking part of Switzerland to continue my studies, a few days before the beginning of the semester I took a trip to the nearby Seeland, where, starting from Ins, I climbed up the so-called Schattenrain. It was a hazy sort of day, and I remember how, on reaching the edge of the small wood covering the slope, I paused to look back down at the path I had come by, at the plain stretching away to the north crisscrossed by the straight lines of canals, with the hills shrouded in mist beyond; and how, when I emerged once more into the fields above the village of Lüscherz, I saw spread out below me the Lac de Bienne, and sat there for an hour or more lost in thought at the sight, resolving that at the earliest opportunity I would cross over to the island in the lake which, on that autumn day, was flooded with a trembling pale light. As so often happens in life, however, it took another 31 years before this plan could be realised and I was finally able, in the early summer of 1996, in the company of an exceedingly obliging host who lived high above the steep shores of the lake and who habitually wore a kind of captain's cap, smoked Indian bidis and seldom spoke, to make the journey across the lake from the city of Bienne to the island of Saint-Pierre, formed during the last ice age by the retreating Rhône glacier into the shape of a whale's back – or so it is generally said. The ship which took us along the edge of the Jura massif where it plunges steeply into the lake was called the Ville de Fribourg. Among the other passengers on board were the gaudily attired members of a male voice choir, who several times during the short crossing struck up from the stern a chorus of "Làhaut sur la montagne, Les jours s'en vont" or another such Swiss refrain, with the sole intention, or so it seemed to me, of reminding me, with the curiously strained, guttural notes their ensemble produced, of how far I had come meanwhile from my place of origin.
Apart from a single farmstead, there is now only one dwelling on the Île Saint Pierre – an island with a circumference of some two miles – and that is a former Cluniac monastery which now houses a hotel and restaurant run by Blausee AG. After walking there from the landing stage, I sat for a while drinking coffee with my companion in the shady trellised courtyard, until it was time for him to take his leave and I watched from the gate as he made his way slowly down the white path, just like a sailor who, I thought to myself, after years of sailing the high seas finds himself washed up on the unfamiliar mainland once more. The room I took at the hotel looked out on the south side of the building, directly adjacent to the two rooms which Jean-Jacques Rousseau occupied when, in September 1765, exactly 200 years before my first sight of the island from the top of the Schattenrain, he found refuge here, at least until the Berne Petit Conseil drove him out from even this last outpost of his native land. "By Saturday next," as an edict sent to the bailli [king's representative] in Nidau stated, "the said M Rousseau is to remove himself from your Excellencies' territories and shall not be permitted to return save under pain of the severest penalty." In the decades after Rousseau's death, when his fame had spread throughout Europe and beyond, an endless procession of illustrious personages visited the island to see for themselves the place in which the philosopher, novelist, autobiographer and inventor of the bourgeois cult of romantic sensibility was for a brief period – as he claims in the Fifth Promenade in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker – happier than in any other place. The adventurer and confidence trickster Cagliostro, the  French conseiller du Parlement Desjobert, the English statesman Thomas Pitt, diverse kings of Prussia, Sweden and Bavaria all came to the island, not least among them the former Empress Joséphine.Apart from a single farmstead, there is now only one dwelling on the Île Saint Pierre – an island with a circumference of some two miles – and that is a former Cluniac monastery which now houses a hotel and restaurant run by Blausee AG. After walking there from the landing stage, I sat for a while drinking coffee with my companion in the shady trellised courtyard, until it was time for him to take his leave and I watched from the gate as he made his way slowly down the white path, just like a sailor who, I thought to myself, after years of sailing the high seas finds himself washed up on the unfamiliar mainland once more. The room I took at the hotel looked out on the south side of the building, directly adjacent to the two rooms which Jean-Jacques Rousseau occupied when, in September 1765, exactly 200 years before my first sight of the island from the top of the Schattenrain, he found refuge here, at least until the Berne Petit Conseil drove him out from even this last outpost of his native land. "By Saturday next," as an edict sent to the bailli [king's representative] in Nidau stated, "the said M Rousseau is to remove himself from your Excellencies' territories and shall not be permitted to return save under pain of the severest penalty." In the decades after Rousseau's death, when his fame had spread throughout Europe and beyond, an endless procession of illustrious personages visited the island to see for themselves the place in which the philosopher, novelist, autobiographer and inventor of the bourgeois cult of romantic sensibility was for a brief period – as he claims in the Fifth Promenade in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker – happier than in any other place. The adventurer and confidence trickster Cagliostro, the  French conseiller du Parlement Desjobert, the English statesman Thomas Pitt, diverse kings of Prussia, Sweden and Bavaria all came to the island, not least among them the former Empress Joséphine.
In the course of our own century, now nearing its end, this Rousseau mania has gradually abated. At any rate, in the few days I spent on the island – during which time I passed not a few hours sitting by the window in the Rousseau room – among the tourists who come over to the island on a day trip for a stroll or a bite to eat, only two strayed into this room with its sparse furnishings – a settee, a bed, a table and a chair – and even those two, evidently disappointed at how little there was to see, soon left again. Not one of them bent down to look at the glass display case to try to decipher Rousseau's handwriting, nor noticed the way that the bleached deal floorboards, almost two feet wide, are so worn down in the middle of the room as to form a shallow depression, nor that in places the knots in the wood protrude by almost an inch. No one ran a hand over the stone basin worn smooth by age in the antechamber, or noticed the smell of soot which still lingers in the fireplace, nor paused to look out of the window with its view across the orchard and a meadow to the island's southern shore. For me, though, as I sat in Rousseau's room, it was as if I had been transported back to an earlier age, an illusion I could indulge in all the more readily inasmuch as the island still retained that same quality of silence, undisturbed by even the most distant sound of a motor vehicle, as was still to be found everywhere in the world a century or two ago. Towards evening, especially, when the daytrippers had returned home, the island was immersed in a stillness such as is scarcely now to be found anywhere in the orbit of our civilised world, and where nothing moved, save perhaps the leaves of the mighty poplars in the breezes which sometimes stirred along the edge of the lake. The paths strewn with a fine limestone gravel grew ever brighter as I walked along them in the gathering dusk, past fenced-in meadows, past a pale motionless field of oats, a vineyard, and a vintner's hut, up to the terrace at the edge of the beech wood already black with night, from where I watched the lights go on one after another on the opposite shore.In the course of our own century, now nearing its end, this Rousseau mania has gradually abated. At any rate, in the few days I spent on the island – during which time I passed not a few hours sitting by the window in the Rousseau room – among the tourists who come over to the island on a day trip for a stroll or a bite to eat, only two strayed into this room with its sparse furnishings – a settee, a bed, a table and a chair – and even those two, evidently disappointed at how little there was to see, soon left again. Not one of them bent down to look at the glass display case to try to decipher Rousseau's handwriting, nor noticed the way that the bleached deal floorboards, almost two feet wide, are so worn down in the middle of the room as to form a shallow depression, nor that in places the knots in the wood protrude by almost an inch. No one ran a hand over the stone basin worn smooth by age in the antechamber, or noticed the smell of soot which still lingers in the fireplace, nor paused to look out of the window with its view across the orchard and a meadow to the island's southern shore. For me, though, as I sat in Rousseau's room, it was as if I had been transported back to an earlier age, an illusion I could indulge in all the more readily inasmuch as the island still retained that same quality of silence, undisturbed by even the most distant sound of a motor vehicle, as was still to be found everywhere in the world a century or two ago. Towards evening, especially, when the daytrippers had returned home, the island was immersed in a stillness such as is scarcely now to be found anywhere in the orbit of our civilised world, and where nothing moved, save perhaps the leaves of the mighty poplars in the breezes which sometimes stirred along the edge of the lake. The paths strewn with a fine limestone gravel grew ever brighter as I walked along them in the gathering dusk, past fenced-in meadows, past a pale motionless field of oats, a vineyard, and a vintner's hut, up to the terrace at the edge of the beech wood already black with night, from where I watched the lights go on one after another on the opposite shore.
When Rousseau fled to the Île Saint-Pierre in the autumn of 1765, he was already on the verge of utter physical and mental exhaustion. Between 1751 and 1761, in his fifth decade and in ever more precarious health, he had, first in Paris and then in the Ermitage at Montmorency, committed to paper thousands upon thousands of pages. The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, which earned him the prize of the Académie de Dijon, the treatise On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, the opera Le Devin du village, the letters on French music and on Providence, to Voltaire and to D'Alembert, the fairytale La Reine fantasque, the novel La Nouvelle Héloïse; Émile, and The Social Contract – all this and more was written during this period alongside the extremely copious correspondence which Rousseau always maintained. When one considers the extent and diversity of this creative output, one can only assume that Rousseau must have spent the entire time hunched over his desk in an attempt to capture, in endless sequences of lines and letters, the thoughts and feelings incessantly welling up within him. Scarcely had he reached the apogee of literary fame for his passionate epistolatory novel proclaiming the natural rights of lovers, than the state of nervous exhaustion resulting from this manic productivity was further exacerbated when Émile and The Social Contract were banned and confiscated by the parlement in Paris, thus making of the celebrated author an outcast, ostracised and banished from France on pain of arrest. Nor does Rousseau fare any better in his native city of Geneva. Here too he is condemned as a godless and seditious person, and his writings consigned to the flames. Looking back on this time when fate turned against him, Rousseau writes in 1770, at the beginning of the last book of his Confessions: "Here commences the work of darkness, in which, for eight years past, I have been entombed, without ever having been able, in spite of all my efforts, to penetrate its frightful obscurity. In the abyss of misfortune in which I am submerged, I feel the … blows which are directed against me. I perceive their immediate instrument, but I cannot see either the hand which guides them or the means which it employs. Shame and misfortune fall upon me as if of themselves, and unawares." Compared with these dark days, the Île Saint-Pierre must truly have appeared to Rousseau, when he arrived there on 9 September, as a paradise in miniature in which he might believe he could collect himself in a stillness, as he writes at the beginning of the "Fifth Walk", interrupted only by the cry of the eagle, the song of an occasional bird, and the rushing of the mountain streams. During his stay on the island Rousseau was provided for by the steward Gabriel Engel and his wife Salome, who managed the farmstead with a few servants, and were later reprimanded by the Berne council for having unquestioningly taken in the refugee without further ado. Nonetheless, Rousseau was hardly as solitary on the island in September and October 1765 as the "Fifth Walk" would have us believe. As in Môtiers, here too he was subject to the attentions of a steady stream of visitors, from whom he frequently found himself obliged to escape via the trapdoor which is still to be seen in his room to this day.When Rousseau fled to the Île Saint-Pierre in the autumn of 1765, he was already on the verge of utter physical and mental exhaustion. Between 1751 and 1761, in his fifth decade and in ever more precarious health, he had, first in Paris and then in the Ermitage at Montmorency, committed to paper thousands upon thousands of pages. The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, which earned him the prize of the Académie de Dijon, the treatise On the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, the opera Le Devin du village, the letters on French music and on Providence, to Voltaire and to D'Alembert, the fairytale La Reine fantasque, the novel La Nouvelle Héloïse; Émile, and The Social Contract – all this and more was written during this period alongside the extremely copious correspondence which Rousseau always maintained. When one considers the extent and diversity of this creative output, one can only assume that Rousseau must have spent the entire time hunched over his desk in an attempt to capture, in endless sequences of lines and letters, the thoughts and feelings incessantly welling up within him. Scarcely had he reached the apogee of literary fame for his passionate epistolatory novel proclaiming the natural rights of lovers, than the state of nervous exhaustion resulting from this manic productivity was further exacerbated when Émile and The Social Contract were banned and confiscated by the parlement in Paris, thus making of the celebrated author an outcast, ostracised and banished from France on pain of arrest. Nor does Rousseau fare any better in his native city of Geneva. Here too he is condemned as a godless and seditious person, and his writings consigned to the flames. Looking back on this time when fate turned against him, Rousseau writes in 1770, at the beginning of the last book of his Confessions: "Here commences the work of darkness, in which, for eight years past, I have been entombed, without ever having been able, in spite of all my efforts, to penetrate its frightful obscurity. In the abyss of misfortune in which I am submerged, I feel the … blows which are directed against me. I perceive their immediate instrument, but I cannot see either the hand which guides them or the means which it employs. Shame and misfortune fall upon me as if of themselves, and unawares." Compared with these dark days, the Île Saint-Pierre must truly have appeared to Rousseau, when he arrived there on 9 September, as a paradise in miniature in which he might believe he could collect himself in a stillness, as he writes at the beginning of the "Fifth Walk", interrupted only by the cry of the eagle, the song of an occasional bird, and the rushing of the mountain streams. During his stay on the island Rousseau was provided for by the steward Gabriel Engel and his wife Salome, who managed the farmstead with a few servants, and were later reprimanded by the Berne council for having unquestioningly taken in the refugee without further ado. Nonetheless, Rousseau was hardly as solitary on the island in September and October 1765 as the "Fifth Walk" would have us believe. As in Môtiers, here too he was subject to the attentions of a steady stream of visitors, from whom he frequently found himself obliged to escape via the trapdoor which is still to be seen in his room to this day.
Although Rousseau was by no means idle as an author in the few weeks he spent on the Île Saint-Pierre, in retrospect he nonetheless came to see this time as an attempt to free himself from the exigencies of literary production. He talks of how he longs now for something other than literary renown, the scent of which, as he says, revolted him from the very moment he first got a whiff of it. The dégoût Rousseau now felt with regard to literature was not merely an intermittent emotional reaction but something that for him always went hand in hand with the act of writing. In accordance with his doctrine of the formerly unspoiled state of nature, he saw the man who reflects as a depraved animal perverted from its natural state, and reflection as a degraded form of mental energy. No one, in the era when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming, with enormous philosophical and literary effort, its entitlement to emancipation, recognised the pathological aspect of thought as acutely as Rousseau, who himself wished for nothing more than to be able to halt the wheels ceaselessly turning within his head. If he nevertheless persevered with writing, then only, as Jean Starobinski notes, in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that, of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable. The copying out of musical notation, which Rousseau was constrained to undertake in his earlier years and at the last in Paris, was for him one of the few means of keeping at bay the thoughts constantly brewing in his head like storm clouds. How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill is shown by Rousseau's description of his apparently so happy days on the island in the Lac de Bienne. He has, as he writes in the "Fifth Walk", deliberately forsworn the burden of work, and his greatest joy has been to leave his books safely shut away and to have neither ink nor paper to hand. However, since the leisure time thus freed up must be put to some use, Rousseau devotes himself to the study of botany, whose basic principles he had acquired in Môtiers on excursions with Jean Antoine d'Ivernois. "I set out to compose," writes Rousseau in the "Fifth Walk", "a Flora Petrinsularis and to describe every single plant on the island in enough detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days. They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon peel; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks – and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description. In accordance with this noble plan, every morning after breakfast I would set out with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systema Naturae under my arm to study one particular section of the island, which I had divided for this purpose into small squares, intending to visit them all one after another in every season." The central motif of this passage is not so much the impartial insight into the indigenous plants of the island as that of ordering, classification and the creation of a perfect system. Thus this apparently innocent occupation – the deliberate resolve no longer to think and merely to look at nature – becomes, for the writer plagued by the chronic need to think and work, a demanding rationalistic project involving the compiling of lists, indices and catalogues, along with the precise description of, for example, the long stamens of self-heal, the springiness of those of nettle and of wall-pellitory, and the sudden bursting of the seed capsules of balsam and of beech. None the less, the leaves of the small herbaria which Rousseau later compiled for Madelon and Julie de la Tour and other young ladies take on the aspect of an innocent bricolage in comparison with the self-destructive business of writing to which he usually submitted himself. A faint aura of unconscious beauty still hovers over these flower collections, in which lichens, sprigs of veronica, lilies-of-the-valley and autumn crocuses have survived, pressed and a little faded, from the 18th century. They can still be admired today in the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The herbarium Rousseau compiled for himself, meanwhile – 11 quarto volumes – was, up to the second world war, preserved in the Botanical Museum in Berlin, until, like so much and so many in that city, it went up in flames one night during one of the nocturnal bombing raids.Although Rousseau was by no means idle as an author in the few weeks he spent on the Île Saint-Pierre, in retrospect he nonetheless came to see this time as an attempt to free himself from the exigencies of literary production. He talks of how he longs now for something other than literary renown, the scent of which, as he says, revolted him from the very moment he first got a whiff of it. The dégoût Rousseau now felt with regard to literature was not merely an intermittent emotional reaction but something that for him always went hand in hand with the act of writing. In accordance with his doctrine of the formerly unspoiled state of nature, he saw the man who reflects as a depraved animal perverted from its natural state, and reflection as a degraded form of mental energy. No one, in the era when the bourgeoisie was proclaiming, with enormous philosophical and literary effort, its entitlement to emancipation, recognised the pathological aspect of thought as acutely as Rousseau, who himself wished for nothing more than to be able to halt the wheels ceaselessly turning within his head. If he nevertheless persevered with writing, then only, as Jean Starobinski notes, in order to hasten the moment when the pen would fall from his hand and the essential things would be said in the silent embrace of reconciliation and return. Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that, of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable. The copying out of musical notation, which Rousseau was constrained to undertake in his earlier years and at the last in Paris, was for him one of the few means of keeping at bay the thoughts constantly brewing in his head like storm clouds. How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill is shown by Rousseau's description of his apparently so happy days on the island in the Lac de Bienne. He has, as he writes in the "Fifth Walk", deliberately forsworn the burden of work, and his greatest joy has been to leave his books safely shut away and to have neither ink nor paper to hand. However, since the leisure time thus freed up must be put to some use, Rousseau devotes himself to the study of botany, whose basic principles he had acquired in Môtiers on excursions with Jean Antoine d'Ivernois. "I set out to compose," writes Rousseau in the "Fifth Walk", "a Flora Petrinsularis and to describe every single plant on the island in enough detail to keep me busy for the rest of my days. They say a German once wrote a book about a lemon peel; I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks – and I did not want to leave even one blade of grass or atom of vegetation without a full and detailed description. In accordance with this noble plan, every morning after breakfast I would set out with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systema Naturae under my arm to study one particular section of the island, which I had divided for this purpose into small squares, intending to visit them all one after another in every season." The central motif of this passage is not so much the impartial insight into the indigenous plants of the island as that of ordering, classification and the creation of a perfect system. Thus this apparently innocent occupation – the deliberate resolve no longer to think and merely to look at nature – becomes, for the writer plagued by the chronic need to think and work, a demanding rationalistic project involving the compiling of lists, indices and catalogues, along with the precise description of, for example, the long stamens of self-heal, the springiness of those of nettle and of wall-pellitory, and the sudden bursting of the seed capsules of balsam and of beech. None the less, the leaves of the small herbaria which Rousseau later compiled for Madelon and Julie de la Tour and other young ladies take on the aspect of an innocent bricolage in comparison with the self-destructive business of writing to which he usually submitted himself. A faint aura of unconscious beauty still hovers over these flower collections, in which lichens, sprigs of veronica, lilies-of-the-valley and autumn crocuses have survived, pressed and a little faded, from the 18th century. They can still be admired today in the Musée Carnavalet and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The herbarium Rousseau compiled for himself, meanwhile – 11 quarto volumes – was, up to the second world war, preserved in the Botanical Museum in Berlin, until, like so much and so many in that city, it went up in flames one night during one of the nocturnal bombing raids.
A dozen years filled with fear and panic await Rousseau after his departure from the Île Saint-Pierre on 25 October. For three years after his return to France in 1767, Rousseau lives with Thérèse La Vasseur – his housekeeper of 20 years and the mother of his five long-lost children – in remote country seats of the nobility such as Château Trye in Normandy, or in small towns like Bourgoin or Monquin far away in the South, always with the shadow of outlawry hanging over him. When, in 1770, on condition of not publishing anything on political or religious questions, he receives permission to reside in the capital, attempting to eke out a living there by copying out sheet music, the morbid universe surrounding him can no longer be dispelled. "The children's grimaces," Starobinski writes, "the price of peas in Les Halles, the small shops in the rue Plâtrière – all appeared to be evidence of the same conspiracy." This notwithstanding, Rousseau does still succeed in accomplishing a considerable amount. He finishes the Confessions and reads from them in various salons in sessions lasting up to 17 (!) hours, to some extent anticipating Franz Kafka's desire to be allowed to read aloud, to an audience condemned to listen, the whole of Stendhal's Éducation sentimentale at one sitting. There follow a few more treatises, on botany and on the government of Poland, as well as the so-called Dialogues, in which Rousseau appears as the judge of Jean-Jacques. In his last two years while out walking he makes notes, on playing cards, for the Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire, which he completes in April 1780. After that he leaves Paris and moves into a small house in the park at Ermenonville which the Marquis de Girardin has placed at his disposal. He lives there for five more weeks in early summer. He rises at dawn, goes for walks, leaning on his cane, in the beautiful surroundings, collects leaves and flowers and sometimes takes a boat out on to the lake. On 2 July – he is 66 years old – he comes back from one of his walks with a terrible headache. Thérèse helps him into a chair. Felled by a stroke, he collapses on to the floor and, after a few convulsions, dies. Two days later he is buried at Ermenonville on the Isle of Poplars. In the years which follow, the Marquis transforms his estate into a parc du souvenir. He has a classical monument erected, the Swiss chalet is completed, a Temple of Philosophy is constructed with an altar dedicated to reverie. Even the cabin in front of which Rousseau would often sit on a bench, gazing out over the peaceful landscape, is carefully preserved. The park has become a site of pilgrimage, and more than one lady sinks down before the grave on the island, pressing her bosom against the cold stone beneath which Rousseau's earthly remains rest, until, that is, on 9 October 1794 they are transferred to the Panthéon. On this memorable day, a group of musicians performed excerpts from the opera Le Devin du village; the oak coffin, triple-lined with lead and further clad with an outer lead covering, was raised from the earth and taken to Paris in a grand and solemn cortège. In all the villages along the route the people lined the streets calling, "Vive la République! Vive la mémoire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau!" On the evening of 10 October the procession arrived at the Tuileries, where a huge crowd was waiting with flaming torches. The coffin, covered by a wooden framework painted with the symbols of the revolution, was placed on a bier surrounded by a semicircle of willows. The main part of the ceremony took place the following morning, when the funeral procession continued on its way to the Panthéon, led by a captain of the United States navy bearing the banner of the stars and stripes, and followed by two standard bearers carrying the tricolore and the colours of the Republic of Geneva.A dozen years filled with fear and panic await Rousseau after his departure from the Île Saint-Pierre on 25 October. For three years after his return to France in 1767, Rousseau lives with Thérèse La Vasseur – his housekeeper of 20 years and the mother of his five long-lost children – in remote country seats of the nobility such as Château Trye in Normandy, or in small towns like Bourgoin or Monquin far away in the South, always with the shadow of outlawry hanging over him. When, in 1770, on condition of not publishing anything on political or religious questions, he receives permission to reside in the capital, attempting to eke out a living there by copying out sheet music, the morbid universe surrounding him can no longer be dispelled. "The children's grimaces," Starobinski writes, "the price of peas in Les Halles, the small shops in the rue Plâtrière – all appeared to be evidence of the same conspiracy." This notwithstanding, Rousseau does still succeed in accomplishing a considerable amount. He finishes the Confessions and reads from them in various salons in sessions lasting up to 17 (!) hours, to some extent anticipating Franz Kafka's desire to be allowed to read aloud, to an audience condemned to listen, the whole of Stendhal's Éducation sentimentale at one sitting. There follow a few more treatises, on botany and on the government of Poland, as well as the so-called Dialogues, in which Rousseau appears as the judge of Jean-Jacques. In his last two years while out walking he makes notes, on playing cards, for the Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire, which he completes in April 1780. After that he leaves Paris and moves into a small house in the park at Ermenonville which the Marquis de Girardin has placed at his disposal. He lives there for five more weeks in early summer. He rises at dawn, goes for walks, leaning on his cane, in the beautiful surroundings, collects leaves and flowers and sometimes takes a boat out on to the lake. On 2 July – he is 66 years old – he comes back from one of his walks with a terrible headache. Thérèse helps him into a chair. Felled by a stroke, he collapses on to the floor and, after a few convulsions, dies. Two days later he is buried at Ermenonville on the Isle of Poplars. In the years which follow, the Marquis transforms his estate into a parc du souvenir. He has a classical monument erected, the Swiss chalet is completed, a Temple of Philosophy is constructed with an altar dedicated to reverie. Even the cabin in front of which Rousseau would often sit on a bench, gazing out over the peaceful landscape, is carefully preserved. The park has become a site of pilgrimage, and more than one lady sinks down before the grave on the island, pressing her bosom against the cold stone beneath which Rousseau's earthly remains rest, until, that is, on 9 October 1794 they are transferred to the Panthéon. On this memorable day, a group of musicians performed excerpts from the opera Le Devin du village; the oak coffin, triple-lined with lead and further clad with an outer lead covering, was raised from the earth and taken to Paris in a grand and solemn cortège. In all the villages along the route the people lined the streets calling, "Vive la République! Vive la mémoire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau!" On the evening of 10 October the procession arrived at the Tuileries, where a huge crowd was waiting with flaming torches. The coffin, covered by a wooden framework painted with the symbols of the revolution, was placed on a bier surrounded by a semicircle of willows. The main part of the ceremony took place the following morning, when the funeral procession continued on its way to the Panthéon, led by a captain of the United States navy bearing the banner of the stars and stripes, and followed by two standard bearers carrying the tricolore and the colours of the Republic of Geneva.
• Translated by Jo Catling.• Translated by Jo Catling.
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