Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire

Rousseau wanders alone on the earth, proscribed by a unanimous agreement of his contemporaries, who have rejected him with a refined hatred. For fifteen years in this strange position, which still seems to him like a bad dream, he at first fought violently against this destiny, struggling without art or prudence, only becoming more deeply entangled in the snares laid for him. His persecutors have exhausted in advance all their resources, covering him with defamation and opprobrium to the point that all human power could add nothing more to it. Fearing nothing anymore since everything has been done, freed from any new dread and delivered from the anxiety of hope, he finally finds peace in this absolute resignation.

He resumes the severe and sincere self-examination he had once called his Confessions, devoting his final days to studying himself and preparing the account he will soon have to render. These pages will form a shapeless journal of his reveries, wherein he will fix in writing the delightful contemplations that fill his daily walks. He will write what he has thought just as it came to him, with as little connection as the ideas of the previous day usually have with those of the next. His body is now but an encumbrance from which he frees himself in advance as much as he can, his soul remaining active and his inner life having grown through the death of all earthly interests.

On Thursday, October 24, 1776, following the boulevards after dinner as far as the Rue du Chemin-Vert, he reaches the heights of Menilmontant and crosses the smiling landscape that separates these two villages all the way to Charonne. He amuses himself by roaming the meadows, stopping to inspect plants in the greenery, discovering with joy the Picris hieracioides and the Bupleurum falcatum, then the Cerastium aquaticum. The countryside, still green but partly stripped of its leaves and already almost deserted after the grape harvest, offers the image of solitude and the approach of winter. He sees himself at the decline of an innocent and unfortunate life, his soul still full of lively sentiments but his drying imagination no longer populating his solitude with beings fashioned after his own heart.

Around six o'clock, descending from Menilmontant almost opposite the Galant Jardinier, a large Great Dane lunges at him, darting in front of a carriage. He attempts a great leap so the dog might pass beneath him, but the fall is violent, his upper jaw striking the rough cobblestones. He loses consciousness and only comes to in the arms of some young men, as night is falling. In this moment of rebirth, he glimpses the sky, a few stars, and a little greenery, being born into life in a delicious sensation where he fills all the perceived objects with his light existence, without a distinct notion of his own individuality or any memory of what has just happened, watching his blood flow like a brook in an enchanting calm.

He returns home walking without difficulty despite his injuries - a split lip, pushed-in teeth, a bruised face, sprained thumbs - and soon discovers that a rumor is spreading in Paris that he died from his fall. This news is accompanied by peculiar circumstances: a subscription has been opened for the printing of manuscripts supposedly found at his home. He understands that a collection of fabricated writings is being kept ready to be attributed to him after his death. The accumulation of so many fortuitous circumstances, the universal agreement of all his enemies, makes him henceforth view this work of persecution as one of heaven's secrets, impenetrable to human reason, which consoles and tranquilizes him by helping him to resign himself.

Having grown old while still learning, like Solon, he has acquired a sorrowful knowledge through adversity. Thrown from childhood into the whirlwind of the world, he learned early on that he was not made to live in it. His ardent imagination leapt over the span of his life to rest upon a tranquil foundation. Raised in a family where morality and piety reigned, then in the home of a minister full of wisdom, he became a Catholic while remaining a Christian. Meditation in seclusion, the study of nature, and the contemplation of the universe forced him to soar toward the Author of things. At forty, he renounced the world and its pomp, setting himself to copying music and undertaking to submit his inner self to a severe examination in order to regulate it just as he would wish to find it upon his death.

After the most ardent and sincere inquiries, he made a lifelong decision regarding the sentiments that mattered to him, adopting on each question the most well-founded stance without pausing over insoluble objections. The result of his painstaking research was such as he recorded in the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. This deliberation and its conclusions seem to have been dictated by Heaven to prepare him for his destiny and enable him to withstand it. Tranquil in his innocence while he imagined only esteem and benevolence among men, traitors silently ensnared him in nets forged in the depths of hell. Without the resources he had set aside for himself against adversity, he could never have risen from the dejection into which this unforeseen kind of misfortune had plunged him.

Plutarch is the book that captivates and benefits him the most, the first reading of his childhood and the last of his old age. Resolved to examine himself regarding falsehood after an abbot hurled at him the sarcasm 'vitam vero impendenti', he first recalls a dreadful lie from his youth, the remorse for which has troubled him his entire life. This memory and the inextinguishable regrets it left behind inspired in him a horror for lying that has shielded his heart from this vice. Yet, upon scrutinizing himself with care, he discovers a number of fabricated things he has spoken as truths. To lie for one's own advantage is imposture, for another's advantage is fraud, to cause harm is calumny. But to lie without profit or prejudice is not a lie: it is fiction.

In his Confessions, far from having concealed or glossed over anything to his detriment, he was rather inclined to lie in the opposite direction by accusing himself with too much severity. He stated forgotten things as it seemed to him they must have been, sometimes lending foreign charms to the truth but never substituting lies for it to palliate his vices. His profession of veracity is founded more on feelings of uprightness and equity than on the abstract reality of things. He has often spun fables but very rarely lied. The motto he had chosen obliged him more than anyone else to a strict profession of truth, but falsity never dictated his lies, which stemmed from weakness, and henceforth all that depends on him is to rectify his error and bring his will back into line.