Ransacking Paris by Patti Miller Page B

been able to conquer it.’ It’s disarming the way he just comes out and admits it. There’s nothing to defend in a blind passion, it simply is.
    And he liked the French: ‘They are naturally obliging, kindly and benevolent, and whatever may be said, really more sincere than those of any other nation. But they are fickle and flighty. The feelings they profess for you are genuine, but those feelings go as they come.’
    That may have had more to do with him than the French – he was hypersensitive and never really fitted in – but he did change France from the inside out. He literally made a revolution – many revolutions in fact – in politics, education, literature, in ordinary attitudes and way of life. For him, feelings, passion, nature and imaginary life overruled rationality and the practical world every day: ‘Never mind how great the distance between my position and the nearest castle in Spain, I had no difficulty in taking up residence there.’
    I had no difficulty either. I was fifteen and lying on my bed reading one of Guy de Maupassant’s nineteenth-century stories, Clair de Lune . A severe priest, fearful of sensuality and tenderness, is won over by the beauty of a moonlit night in his village. On the farm it was a hot January afternoon, the day flattened by the tedium of Mass that morning and by the sun heating the corrugated-iron roof until the rooms underneath were ovens. The day was still, curtains unmoving, the lilac painted bedroom walls and three china half-cups hanging on nails unchanging. Even my brothers and sisters were quiet, stunned by the heat. But I could hear distant nightingales as they ‘shook out their scattered notes – their light, vibrant music that sets one dreaming, without thinking, a music made for kisses, for the seduction of moonlight’. It was cool in that world and the full moon silvered a fine mist around a line of poplars.
    I could easily take up residence in any imaginary village or town.
    I don’t suppose that people were only practical and rational before Rousseau, but he was the one who turned the life of imagination and creativity into a kind of cult. In fact, even though I didn’t read him when I was young, and even though I don’t think I’d like him if I met him now, it was almost certainly because of his strange stormy mind that I ended up in Paris, standing invisible in the rue St Jacques several centuries later.
    I should really introduce him.
    *
    Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 and died in 1778, ten years before the English came to settle in Australia. His mother died when he was born; his father read to him all night long when he was a child, which gave him ‘the strangest and most romantic notions about human life, which neither experience nor reflection has ever succeeded in curing me of’; he became passionately and often hopelessly attached to various women in his life; he liked to be spanked, a pleasure mostly unfulfilled; he believed that ‘Man was born free and is everywhere in chains’; he wrote Of the Social Contract which revolutionaries carried in their pockets, and É mile , a sensitive and natural approach to bringing up children; he had five children, every one of whom he forced his mistress, Thérèse, to put in a foundling home where they probably died; he was neurotic and became paranoid (‘After long being maddish, he is plainly mad,’ said the philosopher Hume when he met him in England); he was the father of Romanticism; and he wrote The Confessions , in which he claims to examine his mind and heart with complete honesty: ‘I have bared my secret soul as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Being’, but there’s something about him that I don’t believe.
    It’s to do with a certain dissembling in myself, I know that much. I recognise something in him that I’ve struggled against for years without being able to name it.