ROUSSEAU’S DOG
by David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Faber £15.99 pp405

Rousseau and Voltaire: an immortal double act, but what kind of double act? For William Blake, who could be terrifyingly sharp, they were like a nasty pair of stand-up comedians, sniggering and sneering at everything Holy: “Mock on, Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau; / Mock on, Mock on; ‘tis all in vain!” For thousands of A-level students, scribbling on the intellectual origins of the French revolution, they have played Marx and Engels to Robespierre’s Stalin. For historians of sensibility, who have noted that Rousseau’s innovations were far more telling in the realm of feeling than of abstract thought, they have been more like Lennon and McCartney. In any of these cases, the names are as firmly linked as those of Messrs Marks and Spencer; and in 1794, the French National Assembly cemented the bond for eternity by reinterring Rousseau’s rotten bones next to the remains of Voltaire in the Pantheon.

All of which would have disgusted both men. They met only once, in a salon in 1751, and such tentative feelings of friendship as they might have felt did not last long. Soon, they were enemies. Rousseau to Voltaire: “It is you who force me to perish on foreign soil, deprived of all the consolations of the dying, cast unceremoniously like a dog on the wayside . . . I despise you.” Voltaire on Rousseau: “If he should need it, one should throw him a hunk of bread on the dunghill where he lies gnashing his teeth at the human race.” Break it up, lads, break it up.

These two books are mainly concerned with other potent relationships in the lives of our dynamic duo: Passionate Minds is a biography of Voltaire’s sometime lover and long-term companion, the brave and extraordinarily gifted Emilie du Châtelet. Rousseau’s Dog has a narrower focus, and tells the story of how the Swiss writer’s intense friendship with the philosopher David Hume curdled and ended in mutual venom. Both accounts are highly entertaining, but — for the Anglophone audience, at least — it is the former that holds the most agreeable surprises.

Voltaire is not much read within our coasts these days, and the one book most people probably know, Candide, suffers badly when set beside Rasselas, Samuel Johnson’s contemporary stab at a fable of disillusionment. (Has anyone here read any of Voltaire’s other greatest hits? His version of Oedipus? Or Semiramis? I rest my case.) The smiling philosophe is imagined as a worthy bore. By contrast, everyone knows that though Rousseau was an absolute cad and rotter, who stuffed the orphanages of Paris with his cast-off bastards, he could write like an angel, and the Confessions remain a gripping if sometimes maddening effusion.

Between them, these two narratives almost turn those received ideas on their heads. If Voltaire’s copious writings remain less than tempting, his life emerges as a gloriously adventurous interweaving of slapstick, cops-and-robbers chases, exploding privies and rags-to-riches stunts. He is, it appears, constantly being challenged to duels, beaten up, arrested, thrown into prison or forced into exile; time and again he bounces back, grinning and victorious, the Aunt Sally of the early Enlightenment. Intellectuals are meant to be impractical types, but Voltaire made himself rich with an ingenious lottery scam, and multiplied that wealth by shrewd trading. The energy, the resourcefulness and the grit are exhilarating; patriotic Britons will also applaud the good sense of Voltaire’s fervently Anglophile Letters from England. The Rousseau of Rousseau’s Dog, by contrast, appears in every bit as bad a light as is cast by the most self-lacerating pages of his Confessions: a parasite, an ingrate, a self-pitying creep with advanced persecution mania.

Voltaire’s story is all the better for having a dashing and warmly sympathetic heroine. The tale of Emilie du Châtelet has been published a number of times before, notably by Nancy Mitford in Voltaire in Love (David Bodanis unchivalrously calls Mitford’s work “clueless”, and says that she “knew as much about science as a shrub”.) It is a story well worth the retelling, and Bodanis tells it vividly, though fastidious readers might turn up their noses at some of his phrasing, reminiscent at times of the bodice-ripper (“they kissed and kissed and kissed”) or the thick-ear thriller (“It was payback time”).

In an age when rich girls were raised to be compliant ninnies, and the ability to sign one’s own name was the height of feminine accomplishment, du Châtelet managed to educate herself to the point where she was Voltaire’s equal as a scholar and his superior as what we would now call a scientist. She could read English, Italian and other languages, carried out vital experiments (she came within a hair’s breadth of discovering infra-red light) and produced a commentary on Newton that not only translated his prose from the Latin but updated his mathematical proofs into more modern form, thereby offering a significant advantage to the continental Newtonians over their British peers. She was a free-liver as well as a free-thinker.

Where Passionate Minds produces a little-known heroine, Rousseau’s Dog shows a famous intellectual hero at his least admirable. David Hume — who could have wiped the floor with a regiment of Rousseaus and Voltaires when it came to systematic thought — was a man of such singular virtue and serenity that it is grim to see him reducing himself to the level of Jean-Jacques, after Rousseau accused him of being at the root of a practical joke. Most people recall Dr Johnson thundering at Boswell that Rousseau, Sir, was a very bad man; Johnson may also have been uncomfortably close to the truth when he maintained that Hume’s conspicuous stoicism was founded in nothing nobler than common-or-garden vanity.

English lessons

Pillars of the French Enlightenment they may have been, but Rousseau and Voltaire had markedly different views on the English. Voltaire was Anglophile, Rousseau was not. “I know,” he remarked, “that the English congratulate themselves on their humanity and the good nature of the nation . . . but much as they might proclaim this, nobody else repeats it after them.” He also sneered at English democracy: “They are free when they elect members of parliament; as soon as those are elected, the electorate is enslaved; it is nothing.”

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16.19 (Passionate Minds) and £14.39 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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websites:
www.wabash.edu/Rousseau/
Rousseau Association site with links

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