100 Chapter V
mountebank, drags with him from village to village, and from mountain to moun-
tain, the unfortunate woman whose mother he drove to death and whose children
he exposed at the doors of an asylum.”^23 The hints of venereal disease and of impli-
cation in Therese’s mother’s death were untrue. It was true, however, that Rous-
seau, the teacher of moral revival and family virtue, had abandoned his own five
children to the nuns. This was Rousseau’s great secret and hidden shame. He was
later to talk about it fully enough in his Confessions, but in 1764 it was known only
to a few. It contradicted everything he stood for and really believed; but he could
not deny it, and could make no reply. To make matters worse, Voltaire had success-
fully mimicked the style of the Genevese pastor Vernes, whom Rousseau believed
to be the author of this latest attack upon him.
Rousseau was disarmed in his dispute with the Geneva patriciate. For the Bur-
ghers he was now an embarrassing ally. It now seemed, or could be said (thanks to
Voltaire), that anyone not believing literally in the Bible was really immoral. In the
canton of Neuchâtel the people stoned him—a “lapidation” whose religious sym-
bolism was not lost upon him. Believing himself misunderstood, betrayed, and
crucified, he fled from Switzerland, as he had fled from Paris.
He went to England, then back to France. He now sometimes had positive hal-
lucinations. He could not tell his enemies from his friends. He suspected them all,
was convinced that a great web of conspiracy enmeshed him, that he was every-
where persecuted, that spies were watching him, that seeming friends wanted only
to ridicule and undo him. Medical diagnosis of persons long since dead is absurd on
the face of it, but it does seem that Rousseau was increasingly gripped by an actual
neurosis. It was a neurosis which, in a personal way, foreshadowed the mass neurosis
of the French Republic, when it too, proclaiming its own virtue in the face of aris-
tocracies and churches, behaved very queerly in a world of enemies, some real, some
imaginary, and some simply unknown.
At Geneva the crisis mounted. It had started with a protest against condemna-
tion of the Social Contract. It may be supposed, therefore, that the leading
Représentants had read the book. They were, however, sober men inclined to prefer
legal and concrete historical arguments. In their official statements, designed to
persuade the patricians, they never cited Rousseau, but argued from the Act of
1738 and earlier legislation at Geneva. It is important to see how some of these
men were led by the actual situation into the assertion of ideas much like those of
the Social Contract.
In January 1765 the Small Council had great difficulty in getting its candidates
for Syndics elected. The slate, which included a Gallatin, obtained only about 700
votes from the 1,500 possible voters. At the end of 1765 the General Council
seven times refused to elect any procurator- general and lieutenant- general at all. In
this voters’ strike normal government could not go forward. On January 6, 1766,
the Small Council, reflecting the wishes of the governing class, therefore called in
the guarantors of the Act of 1738. A few days later the General Council three
23 Volt a i re , Oeuvres complètes (52 vols., Paris, 1883–1885), X XV, 312. See also Chapponière, Vol-
taire chez les Calvinistes, 180.