Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LEO DAMROSCH was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships, among other honors. Currently the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of literature at Harvard University, he has written widely on eighteenth-century writers. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Restless GeniusBy Leo Damrosch

Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright © 2007 Leo Damrosch
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780618872022
1 The Loneliness of a Gifted Child

"I was born in Geneva in 1712," Rousseau wrote in his Confessions, "son of
Isaac Rousseau citoyen and Suzanne Bernard citoyenne." He was always
proud of that citizenship, and when he became a prominent writer in Paris he
signed himself Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Genève. But by then he
had abjured the Protestant faith and thereby lost his citizenship rights in
Geneva. Still later his books would be publicly burned there, and a standing
warrant lodged for his arrest if ever he should return.
The birth on June 28 was inauspicious. "I was born almost dying,"
he claimed without further explanation; "they had little hope of saving me."
And a true disaster made his birth "the first of my misfortunes." Three days
after he was baptized in the great cathedral on July 4, his mother died of
puerperal fever. Half a century later, when he wrote his treatise on child
development, Rousseau declared that a small child has no way of
understanding death. "He has not been shown the art of affecting grief that he
doesn't feel; he has not feigned tears at anyone's death, because he doesn't
know what it is to die." But his own early experience was of being required to
grieve for a mother whom he resembled disturbingly and had somehow killed,
and this burden of guilt haunted his later life. If he was indeed born almost
dying, he may well have felt that it would have been better if he had died in
her place. Throughout his life he tended to see motherhood in a sentimental
light; in middle age he wrote solemnly to a young man seeking advice, "A
son who quarrels with his mother is always wrong . . . The right of mothers is
the most sacred I know, and in no circumstances can it be violated without
crime."
There was a lot Rousseau seems never to have known about his
parents, including their ages; he thought his father was fifteen years younger
than he actually was. He was even less well informed about his ancestors.
Like many Genevan families, the first Rousseaus immigrated from France
when Protestants began to be persecuted there. Didier Rousseau, Jean-
Jacques' great-great-great-grandfather, arrived in Geneva in 1549 and went
into business as a wine merchant. He had been a bookseller in Paris and
may well have gotten into trouble, as his famous descendant did two
centuries later, for subversive publications. It would be pleasant to think that
Jean-Jacques was proud of this ancestor who had accepted exile for his
beliefs, but there is no evidence that he ever heard of him.
Didier's descendants became industrious tradespeople and
artisans, leaving little trace in official records, but Jean-Jacques' father, Isaac,
was an interesting character. He took up watchmaking as a trade, not
surprisingly, since his grandfather, father, and brothers were all
watchmakers. But he also loved music and played the violin well, and
as a young man he abandoned the workshop to become a dancing master.
Dancing was no longer forbidden by the Calvinist theocracy of Geneva, but it
was not in good repute, and the Consistory — a committee of pastors and
laymen that oversaw morals — limited it to foreign residents who refused to
give it up. After a short time Isaac ended this dubious experiment and
returned to the family trade, in which he eventually qualified as a master
craftsman. Over the years, however, his volatile temper repeatedly got him
into trouble. In 1699 he provoked a quarrel with some English officers who
drew their swords and threatened him; it was he who was punished, since
the authorities were anxious to propitiate foreigners. A similar incident would
one day result in his virtual disappearance from his son's life.
As Jean-Jacques understood it, his own origin was a sad chapter
in a great romance. His mother's family was socially superior to the
Rousseaus and disapproved of the daughter's alliance with a humble
watchmaker, even though the pair had been inseparable since early
childhood. According to the story in the Confessions, Suzanne advised Isaac
to travel in order to forget her, but he returned more passionate than ever.
She had remained chaste, they swore eternal fidelity, "and heaven blessed
their vow." Meanwhile Suzanne's brother Gabriel fell in love with Isaac's sister
Théodora, who insisted on a joint wedding, and so it was that "love arranged
everything, and the two weddings took place on the same day."
The facts that can be extracted from the records tell a rather
different story. Suzanne's father, Jacques Bernard, had been jailed for
fornication, and a year later was required to pay the expenses of an
illegitimate child by a second mistress. He then married a third woman, Anne-
Marie Marchard, and Suzanne was born six months later. When Suzanne
was only nine her father died, in his early thirties, and the family took care
afterward to erase his memory as much as possible. The kindly pastor
Samuel Bernard, who raised her, and whom Jean- Jacques always believed
to be her father (he died eleven years before the boy's birth), was actually her
uncle.
Suzanne was good-looking, musically talented, and evidently a
spirited young woman. In 1695, when she was twenty-three, she was
summoned before the Consistory to be rebuked for permitting a married man
named Vincent Sarrasin to visit her. Equally provocatively, she showed an
interest in the theater, which was illegal in Geneva except for street
performances. One day in the Place Molard, "near the theater where they sell
medicines and play farces and comedies, the maiden lady Bernard was seen
dressed as a man or a peasant." Further inquiry established that she was
disguised as a peasant woman, not as a man, and according to witnesses
she claimed she wanted to see the farces without being recognized by her
would-be lover, Sarrasin. She herself swore that none of this ever happened,
but the Consistory delivered a stern verdict: "Persuaded, notwithstanding her
denial, that we are well informed as to the truth of the said disguise, for which
we have censured her severely, . . . we exhort her solemnly to have no
commerce at all with M. Vincent Sarrasin."
Eight years later, when she was thirty-one, Suzanne married
Isaac Rousseau. This was not particularly late by the standards of the time.
The age of majority was twenty-five, and in France as well as Geneva the
average marriage age was twenty-eight, reflecting insistence on financial
security and serving as well to hold down the birth rate. But the twin
weddings Jean-Jacques evoked in the Confessions were a fairy tale. Isaac's
sister did marry Suzanne's brother, but that happened five years earlier,
barely a week before the birth of their child, a circumstance that provoked a
stern condemnation by the Consistory. The infant died immediately, and this
too was a story that Jean-Jacques never heard anything about. Instead he
was encouraged by his family to harbor a highly romantic idea of his parents'
and their siblings' irresistible attraction and triumph over obstacles.
Isaac and Suzanne began their married life in comfortable
circumstances, in the Bernards' elegant house at Grande Rue No. 40 in the...