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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 April 2013
The most striking feature of Rousseau's self-presentation in the Confessions is his pathos-filled anticipation of future adversity. Never quite arriving at the depths of despair he foresees, however, Rousseau instead offers the reader glimpses of a surprisingly robust happiness. In this article I present a new political reading of the Confessions that is attentive both to the rhetorical surface of the work and to its charming subplot. Guided by Rousseau's humorous understanding of truth telling, I argue that the Confessions is shaped by a complex literary ruse that colors much of what Rousseau has to say about frankness, happiness, and his own idiosyncrasy. Far from being undone by his shadow-dappled imaginings, Rousseau's conscious dissimulations reflect his concerns about the public value of enlightenment and his commitment to authorial responsibility.
1 Rousseau citations refer to the following translations: Confessions (hereafter C), in The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Kelly, Christopher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995)Google Scholar; Emile, or On Education, trans. Bloom, Allan (New York: Basic Books, 1979)Google Scholar; Essay on the Origin of Languages, in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, ed. and trans. Scott, John T. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998)Google Scholar; First Discourse, in First and Second Discourses, trans. Masters, Roger D. and Masters, Judith R. (New York: St. Martin's, 1964)Google Scholar; Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre, ed. and trans. Bloom, Allan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Butterworth, Charles E. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992)Google Scholar; Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, trans. Bush, Judith R., Kelly, Christopher, and Masters, Roger D. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990)Google Scholar; Second Discourse, in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Polemics and Political Economy, ed. Masters, Roger and Kelly, Christopher and trans. Bush, Judith R., Kelly, Christopher, and Masters, Roger (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992)Google Scholar.
2 Those who discuss Rousseau's autobiographical works from a literary perspective include Williams, Huntington, Rousseau and Romantic Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar and Stelzig, Eugene, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000)Google Scholar. A more psychoanalytic approach can be found in Starobinski, Jean, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971)Google Scholar and Ogrodnick, Margaret, Instinct and Intimacy: Political Philosophy and Autobiography in Rousseau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The following works focus more exclusively on the philosophical content of the autobiographical works: McCardle, Ann, “Rousseau on Rousseau: The Individual and Society,” Review of Politics 39, no. 2 (1977): 250–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hartle, Ann, The Modern Self in Rousseau's “Confessions”: A Reply to St. Augustine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Kelly, Christopher, Rousseau's Exemplary Life: The Confessions as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Grant, Ruth, Hypocrisy and Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau, and the Ethics of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Michael, The Autobiography of Philosophy: Rousseau's “The Reveries of the Solitary Walker” (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999)Google Scholar; and Wright, LenoreThe Philosopher's “I”: Autobiography and the Search for the Self (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
3 On the tendency among theorists to hold the autobiographical Rousseau at a distance, see Hartle, Modern Self, 4–8; Kelly, Exemplary Life, 210–11; and Ogrodnick, Instinct, 39–40.
4 Most scholars agree that Rousseau suffered terribly late in life, and early critics such as Irving Babbitt (in Rousseau and Romanticism [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1919]Google Scholar) charged him with outright insanity. Some later readers such as Starobinski and biographer Raymond Trousson are dismissive of the late Rousseau, while more sympathetic readers include Maurice Cranston, Leo Damrosch, William L. Howarth, Stelzig, and Hartle—but even they typically take Rousseau's frequent expressions of misery as evidence of unhappiness permeating the second half of his life. The following remark by Cranston is representative of the orthodox scholarly outlook on Rousseau's later years: “Condemned to wander the earth in search of asylum, he felt befriended one moment, betrayed the next. Obsessed by feelings of persecution, not all unwarranted, he came to see himself as a social outcast and concentrated on writing autobiographical works aimed at revealing his essential innocence and truthfulness. Through this introspection, he was to transform his misery and solitude into enduring works of literature—the most notable his Confessions” (The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997]Google Scholar, xii).
5 To be clear from the outset: I do not mean to suggest that Rousseau did not suffer in his lifetime. From all accounts it is evident that he had a difficult life, that a good part of his suffering was the result of genuine persecution, and that Rousseau in turn could be a difficult person. My suggestion is that Rousseau's self-presentation is exaggerated, that he did not suffer as ubiquitously as he implies, and that he did experience regular and sustained periods of genuine happiness.
6 While others have worked to reconcile Rousseau's autobiography with his political philosophy, they form a minority among Rousseau scholars, and none of them focus squarely on the question of Rousseau's happiness in the Confessions. Thus, while Ogrodnick's work contains valuable suggestions about the political implications of Rousseau's autobiographical works, she denies that the works are anything less than perfectly frank (see Instinct, 23–24), and thus does not question the orthodox understanding of the trajectory of Rousseau's life. Grant focuses on Rousseau's personal understanding of political integrity and provides an arresting account of his sense of the need for hypocrisy and deception in political life, but does not spell out the implications of this reading for our understanding of the autobiographical works. Others, such as Hartle and Kelly, provide rich interpretations of Rousseau's autobiographical world, and identify various rhetorical strains in his Confessions; though both speak at length about Rousseau's troubles and their likely sources, neither discusses whether the overall pathos of the work is meant sincerely. McCardle too focuses on the political relevance of the Confessions, and briefly takes up the question of Rousseau's happiness, but she does not explore how his rhetoric works together with the theme of happiness. While Chamayou, Anne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ou le sujet de rire (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2009)Google Scholar and Meier, Heinrich, “Rousseau on the Philosophical Life: Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire,” in Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle, ed. Burns, Timothy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 305–23Google Scholar, do explicitly question the sincerity of Rousseau's pathos, neither focuses on the Confessions. Finally, while Laurence Cooper's recent article (“Nearer My True Self to Thee: Rousseau's New Spirituality—and Ours,” Review of Politics 74, no. 3 [2012]: 465–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar) does discuss Rousseau's happiness in the Confessions, he does not take up the “rhetoric of despair.” A secondary goal of this paper is to provide a unifying thread through this area of the secondary literature.
7 It is easy to underestimate Rousseau's sense of humor. As Chamayou explains, the consensus is that “on ne badine pas avec Rousseau” (one doesn't banter with Rousseau) as he is too serious, too austere, and his happiness too delicate (Sujet, 18). As Chamayou further explains, to the extent that Rousseau's good humor and happiness are recognized, they are generally understood to be limited to the epochs that Rousseau describes in Part I of the Confessions and to the later period described in the Reveries. For Chamayou, recognizing Rousseau's sense of humor is a key step on the path toward questioning the traditional breakdown of Rousseau's life (Sujet, 20). McCardle suggests a similar perspective on Rousseauian humor when she describes the Confessions as opera bouffe (“Rousseau on Rousseau,” 264).
8 See Confessions, 293–97, and the second Letter to Malesherbes, 574–77. See also Hartle, Modern Self, 136–83, on how this revolution relates to Augustine's conversion.
9 A statement from Voltaire's letter to Rousseau of August 30, 1755, captures the general reaction of the philosophes: “The arts nourish, refine, and console the soul; and they make for your glory even as you write against them. You are like Achilles transported against glory, and like Father Malebranche—whose brilliant imagination brings him to write against imagination” (in Streckeisen-Moultou, M. G., J.-J. Rousseau: Ses amis et ses ennemis [Paris: Michel Levy Frères, 1865]Google Scholar, 1:267). In Hypocrisy and Integrity, Grant explicates clearly how Rousseau's case against enlightenment involves him in an implicit defense of political deceptiveness, though she generally keeps to the political works (see 102–41). See Kelly, Christopher, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One's Life to the Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1–28Google Scholar, for an elucidation of the conditions underlying Rousseau's persecution, and of his bold response to the publishing conditions of his time. See McCardle, “Rousseau on Rousseau,” 262–63, and Hartle, Modern Self, 118–25, for an opposite take on the severity of the “Great Plot” against Rousseau. Hartle provides an especially rich explanation of Rousseau's would-be paranoia. For objections to Hartle's interpretation, see Kelly, Exemplary Life, 210–21.
10 Interpreters fall into a variety of groups that correspond to particular views of Rousseau's system, paradoxes, and rhetoric. Peter Gay provides a helpful account of the early history of Rousseau scholarship in his introduction to the important book by Cassirer, Ernst, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Today, thanks to the efforts of Cassirer and others, the tendency is to treat Rousseau's thought as more unified. The classic treatment of Rousseau's “system” is Melzer, Arthur, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; unfortunately, Melzer tends to exclude the autobiographical works from the system. For a treatment of Rousseau's paradoxes, see Mendham, Matthew, “Gentle Savages and Fierce Citizens against Civilization: Unraveling Rousseau's Paradoxes,” American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 1 (2011): 170–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Rousseau's rhetoric, see Cassirer, Question of Jean-Jacques, 35–36; Emberley, Peter, “Rousseau versus the Savoyard Vicar: The Profession of Faith Considered,” Interpretation 14, no. 3 (1986): 299–301 and 324–29Google Scholar; Melzer, Natural Goodness, 253–82; Orwin, “Rousseau's Discovery of Political Compassion,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Orwin, Clifford and Tarcov, Nathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): 296–315Google Scholar; and Marks, Jonathan, Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 89–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kelly, Christopher, “Taking Readers as They Are: Rousseau's Turn from Discourses to Novels,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 85–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is especially helpful on the question of rhetoric, as is Meier's essay on the Rêveries.
11 For an alternative presentation of these arguments from the First Discourse, see McLendon, Michael Locke, “Rousseau, Amour Propre, and Intellectual Celebrity,” Journal of Politics 71, no. 2 (2009): 508–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. McLendon focuses on honor and amour-propre as the essential sources of corruption in modern societies (see “Rousseau, Amour Propre,” 515–17, and McLendon, “The Overvaluation of Talent: An Interpretation and Application of Rousseau's Amour-Propre,” Polity 36, no. 1 [2003]: 128–33)Google Scholar. On this question I agree with Cooper's suggestion that the core social problem for Rousseau is not the rise of amour-propre and honor as such, but at bottom involves a problem of judgment (see Cooper, Laurence D., “Rousseau on Self-Love: What We've Learned, What We Might Have Learned,” Review of Politics 60, no. 4 [1998]: 671–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Cooper shows how Rousseau sustains the distinction between pride and vanity, with the former grounded in praise for something good that one has earned.
12 See Marks, Perfection, 151–53, for a discussion of the relationship between liberal enlightenment and modern unhappiness.
13 See McLendon, “Rousseau, Amour-Propre,” for accounts of the philosophes' campaign to “become the new aristocracy and legitimate arbiters of social value and taste” (510), and of the dangers associated with the public elevation of intellectual life. As Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 1–28, and Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1999)Google Scholar, 73, argue, Rousseau worries that his sophisticated contemporaries invariably worked on behalf of the despotic ancien régime, and thinks that the enlightenment prejudice in favor of intellectualism threatens to undermine serious thought (see also Strauss, Leo, “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Social Research 14, no. 4 [1947]: 455–87Google Scholar).
14 On Rousseauian sincerity as a cultural phenomenon, see Melzer, Arthur M., “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 2 (1996): 344–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Melzer, “Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity,” in The Legacy of Rousseau, 274–95. For discussions of the truthfulness of the Confessions in particular, see Hartle, Modern Self, 13–24; Kelly, Exemplary Life, 13–19; and Grant, Hypocrisy, 111–24. For the definitive consideration of the relationship between Rousseau and St. Augustine, see Hartle, Modern Self. See also McCardle, “Rousseau on Rousseau,” 252, 259–61; Williams, Romantic Autobiography, 2–3; Kelly, Exemplary Life, 11–13, 103–7 and 211–12; and Cranston, Solitary Self, 180–81.
15 McCardle, “Rousseau on Rousseau,” 255.
16 For a relevant discussion of Rousseau's treatment of the figure of Socrates in the First Discourse, see Orwin, Clifford, “Rousseau's Socratism,” Journal of Politics 60, no. 1 (1998): 174–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Orwin notes there, even as early as the First Discourse, “Rousseau-as-Socrates is cruder, more truculent, more of a know-nothing than the Platonic Socrates” (176)—and he is also at once more learned, literary, and rhetorical (176n5). Orwin argues that Rousseau is at once more populist and more elitist than Socrates—that he is at once a greater critic of enlightenment in the name of the people and a fiercer advocate of an elite vanguard of philosophy. I agree with this as a general characterization of the difference between Socrates and Rousseau, but with the caveat that it does not sufficiently address the complications raised by the Platonic Socrates's critique of the Sophists. See also Kelly, Exemplary Life, 48–75; and Jackson, M. W., “Rousseau's Discourse on Heroes and Heroism,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133, no. 3 (1989): 436–38Google Scholar.
17 See Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 1–2 and 173–74, for a discussion of Rousseau's motto.
18 See Gourevitch, Victor, “Rousseau on Lying: A Provisional Reading of the Fourth Reverie,” Berkshire Review, no. 15 (1980): 93–107Google Scholar; Hartle, Modern Self, 9–10 and 13–24; Grant, Hypocrisy, 111–24; Davis, Autobiography of Philosophy, 147–68; Kelly, Exemplary Life, 16–18 and 240–42; and Meier, “Philosophical Life.” Especially relevant here is Meier's acknowledgment of Rousseau's “eccentric” concealment of true goodness (311).
19 On the difference between general and particular truths, see Second Discourse, 124–25, and Kelly, Exemplary Life, 16–19.
20 Kelly, Exemplary Life, 243.
21 In interpreting the Confessions, it is helpful to distinguish between Rousseau the author and the subject of the narrative. One useful practice is to identify the character/subject of the Confessions as Jean-Jacques. For other accounts of Rousseau's psychological “doubleness,” see MacCannell, Juliet Flower, “History and Self: Portrait in Rousseau's Autobiography,” Studies in Romanticism 13, no. 4 (1974): 280–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howarth, “Some Principles,” 363–67; Hartle, Modern Self, 3–4, 12, and 23; Williams, Romantic Autobiography, 7 and 74; Kelly, Exemplary Life, 9; and Wright, Philosopher's “I,” 76–88.
22 See McCardle, “Rousseau on Rousseau,” 258–59 and 264–69, for discussions of the role that Rousseau's mortal illness played in preparing his temperament for persistent well-being. See Hartle, Modern Self, 38–68, for a thorough discussion of the role that death and immortality play in the work.
23 Even so, Hartle is right to point out the looming significance of death (Modern Self, 38–68 and 148–55). See also Kelly, Exemplary Life, 221–238, for a quite different understanding of the ending of the Confessions.
24 See Wright, Philosopher's “I,” 82–86.
25 Rousseau specifically denies that he torments himself with thoughts about the misfortunes done him by his enemies (see 490). See also Dialogues, II.153, and Trousson, Raymond, Jean-Jacques Rousseau raconté par ceux qui l'ont vu (Bruxelles: Le Cri édition, 2004), 171, 202, 205–6Google Scholar, and 255.
26 Meier captures the difficulty of determining the true character of Rousseau's existence with the following remark: “Rousseau neither gives a direct view nor shows the integral form of the activity that sustains his life and founds his eccentricity. He discloses it only in the medium of alienation and fragmentation, spectrally refracted and laid out in parts; and it remains the reader's task to fit them together into one whole and integrate them into one movement” (“Philosophical Life,” 311). Meier follows through on this task with respect to the Reveries (314–21). Cooper emphasizes Rousseau's need for wholeness and order, in Cooper, Laurence D., “Between Eros and Will to Power: Rousseau and ‘The Desire to Extend our Being,’” American Political Science Review 98, no. 1 (2004): 105–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 On Rousseauian idleness/laziness and reverie, see C 95, 97, 153, 169, 241, 337, 338–39, 534, 544, and 537; on botany see 151, 537, and the Seventh Walk; on his attitudes toward writing and study, see C 151, 194–95, 227, 240–41, 343, 344, 365, 414–15, 420–21, 430, 432, 437, 476, 508, 521, 476, and Meier, “Philosophical Life,” 313; on walking see C 136, 144–45, 344, and Cranston, Solitary Self, 86–87.
28 Rousseau invites us to focus on passive reverie as the essential source of his happiness, and to overlook the more active (and much more questionable) activity of creative composition. And so, while commentators such as Hartle and Kelly emphasize the fleeting character of Rousseau's happiness (see Modern Self, 56, and Exemplary Life, 235), and others such as McCardle and Cooper agree that his happiness is more sustained (see McCardle, “Rousseau on Rousseau,” 264, and Cooper, “New Spirituality,” 465–84, especially 484), there seems to be general agreement that Rousseau's happiness, to the extent that it exists, is rooted in self-awareness rather than in the activity of willing (see, for example, McCardle, “Rousseau on Rousseau,” 266, 277–78, Hartle, Modern Self, 66–67 and 152). Though Cooper insightfully calls our attention to the active character of Rousseau's self-consciousness (see Cooper, “New Spirituality,” 481–84), it still seems to me that he understates the extent to which Rousseau enjoys attempting to shape the external world too with his creative will (and so overstates the gulf between Rousseauian “being” and Machiavellian “willing”; see “New Spirituality,” 465, 473, and 488). The implications of this distinction are far-reaching. Consider, for example, the difference between convergence with nature and godlike human creationism as models for an environmental ethic (see Lane, Joseph H. Jr., “Reverie and the Return to Nature: Rousseau's Experience of Convergence,” Review of Politics 68, no. 3 [2006]: 484–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar). On a different note, Leonard Sorenson draws our attention to the metaphysical import of the philosopher's happiness in Rousseau's oeuvre (“Natural Inequality and Rousseau's Political Philosophy,” Western Political Quarterly 43, no. 4 [1990]Google Scholar: 776).
29 On fiction and alienation, see Barber, Benjamin, “Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagination,” Daedalus 107, no. 3 (1978): 79–92 and 82–86Google Scholar; Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 59–67Google Scholar; Kelly, “Taking Readers,” 85–101; and Bloom, introduction to Politics and the Arts, xi–xxxiv. My suggestion here is in tension with Kelly's conception of Rousseau as an exemplar (Exemplary Life, 69–75), since according to my reading Rousseau seeks to discourage readers from taking up his way of life more than he seeks to inspire generalized emulation. Perhaps the truth is something like the following: Rousseau wants to inspire emulators—and presumably emulators of many kinds, including emulators in active happiness—but only among those capable of imitating his genuine authorial responsibility. On this note, see Rousseau as Author, 111, where Kelly explains how being lovable, and even weak, can contribute to one's rhetorical influence.
30 For helpful accounts of Rousseau's emphasis on psychological wholeness over bourgeois corruption, see Melzer, Natural Goodness, and “Rousseau and the Problem of Bourgeois Society,” American Political Science Review 74, no. 4 (1980): 1018–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cooper, “Rousseau, Nature,” 186–90; and Marks, Perfection, 151–53.
31 See Melzer, Natural Goodness, 279; and Kelly, Exemplary Life, 69.
32 And so, Rousseau's position is too consciously contrived to be branded hypocrisy; though he recognizes the need for political dissembling, his own position, as Grant suggests, is one of very complicated integrity (Hypocrisy, 122–23, 139–41). See also Meier, “Philosophical Life,” 312–13.
33 See Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 80–81.
34 This portrait is rhetorically complex, its various aspects emerging over the course of the Second Discourse, Emile, and the Essay on the Origin of Languages. The essential point here is that, for Rousseau, compassion is, generally speaking, a healthy emotion that offers us a glimpse of our own relative well-being and wholeness next to the suffering other. For extensive discussions of Rousseauian compassion, see Orwin, “Rousseau's Discovery”; Boyd, Richard, “Pity's Pathologies Portrayed: Rousseau and the Limits of Democratic Compassion,” Political Theory 11, no. 4 (2004): 519–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Marks, “Rousseau's Discriminating Defense of Compassion,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 4 (2007): 727–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Others have made similar arguments about how the active reader is challenged to learn from Rousseau. See, for example, Hartle, Modern Self, 31–32; Cooper, “Rousseau, Nature,” 193n7; Kelly Exemplary Life, 236–38, and Rousseau as Author, 113; and Meier, “Philosophical Life.”
36 This suggestion is consistent with Ogrodnick's conception of Rousseau's desire to create a “liberal sphere of protection around the individual” (Instinct, 16; see also 105–6, 162–93), but it also calls into question her insistence on the radically democratic character of Rousseau's thought, and her central claim that Rousseau means for the “intimate” insights of the autobiographical works to be put in the service of republican goals (see 39, 187). Rousseau intends to influence public passions, as Ogrodnick suggests, but his influence is cultural and indirect (see Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 81, and Marks, Perfection, 155), and he prefers that the liberal spheres of genuine authenticity and freedom afforded by softened social mores be private ones. While Orwin may go too far when he suggests that there are no intellectual middlemen in Rousseauian politics (“Socratism,” 184), Rousseau does encourage men of talent to keep a low public profile (to serve, for example, in the bureaucracy; see McLendon, “Rousseau, Amour Propre,” 513). Kelly's conception of Rousseau as both literary citizen and responsible philosopher captures the complexity of Rousseau's view (Rousseau as Author, 139–71).
37 In the Confessions, Jean-Jacques is especially solicitous when it comes to the well-being of his persecuted contemporaries (such as Diderot, Palissot, and Morrellet), he reserves his highest praise for those who live active, but tolerant, lives (see C 41, 119, 152, 275, 500–501). Rousseau also admits that toleration and public concord were some of his “secret motives” (C 366), commenting on the impending danger of a civil war “in which the cruelest intolerance was at bottom the same on both sides” (referring here to “philosophers” and Christians).
38 For considerations of the most relevant period—that immediately following the departure from Switzerland that Rousseau anticipates at the end the Confessions—see Cranston, Solitary Self, 144–56, and Damrosch, Leo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Mariner Books, 2007), 412–17Google Scholar. See too the letter to Davenport from October 1767: “You want to know how I spend my time. About the same as [I did] in Wootton. I am living in a very agreeable locale, where I live in solitude as much as I can, and bide my time in the usual way, without fearing or desiring a thing” (Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Leigh, R. A., vol. 34 [Oxford: Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 2004], 6158)Google Scholar.
39 Chamayou, Sujet, 51.
40 That Rousseau's beguiling authorial tone has often seeped unwittingly into portraits issued by contemporaries and biographers is indicated by the frequency with which such writers express surprise at Rousseau's good-humored reversals of fortune (see, for example, biographers Damrosch, Restless Genius, 294, 345, 366, 382, 404, 462, and 463; Cranston, Solitary Self, 3, 57, 86, 91, 93, 107, 120, 137, 144, and 169; Raymond Trousson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 2, Le deuil éclatant du bonheur (Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 1989)Google Scholar, 276, 297, 358, 374, 383, 415, 416, 417, and 421; for examples recollected by Rousseau's contemporaries, see Trousson, Rousseau raconté, 169, 176, 188, 193, 199, 202, 220, 231, 232, 242, 245, 247, 255, and 275). See also Hartle, Modern Self, 172n66. With respect to the possibility of “artful living,” many reports, by friends and foes alike, suspect Rousseau of engaging in theatrical behavior with a view to his reputation (see Trousson, Rousseau raconté, 195–97, 220, 227, and 242; see also Cranston, Solitary Self, 183–84 and 195; C 123–28).