Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

23
ROUS
treatment of skies with crude blues and orange, and his
chiaroscuro usually is much exaggerated. On his return
to Paris he soon became distinguished as a painter, and
was employed by Louis XIY. to decorate the walls of his
palaces at St Germain and Marly. He was soon admitted
a member of the French Academy of the Fine Arts, but
on the revocation of the edict of Nantes he was obliged
to take refuge in Holland, and his name was struck off
the Academy roll. From Holland he was invited to Eng¬
land by the duke of Montague, who employed him,
together with other French painters, to paint the walls of
his palace, Montague House.1 Rousseau was also employed
to paint architectural subjects and landscapes in the palace
of Hampton Court, where many of his decorative panels
still exist. He spent the latter part of his life in London,
where he died in 1693.
Besides being a painter in oil and fresco Rousseau was an etcher
of some ability ; many etchings by his hand from the works of the
Caracci and from his own designs still exist; they are vigorous,
though too coarse in execution.
ROUSSEAU, Jean Baptiste (1670-1741), a poet of
some merit and a wit of considerable dexterity, was born
at Paris on the 10th April 1670; he died at Brussels
on the 17th March 1741. The son of a shoemaker, he is
said to have been ashamed of his parentage and relations
when he acquired a certain popularity, but the abundance
of literary quarrels in which he spent his life, and the
malicious inventiveness of his chief enemy, Voltaire, make
any such stories of small account. He was certainly well
educated and early gained favour with Boileau, who did
not regard many people favourably; but authentic intelli¬
gence as to his youth is very scarce. He does not seem to
have attempted literature very young, and when he began
he began with the theatre, for which at no part of his life
does he seem to have had any aptitude. A one-act
comedy, Le Cafe, failed in 1694, and he was not much
happier with a more ambitious play, Les Flatteurs, or
with the opera of Venus and Adonis. He would not take
these warnings, and tried in 1700 another comedy, Le
Capricieux, which had the same fate. By this time he
had already (it is not quite clear how) obtained influential
patrons, such as Breteuil and Tallard, had gone with
Tallard as an attache to London, and, in days when litera¬
ture still led to high position, seemed likely to achieve
success. To tell the whole story of his misfortunes would
take far more space than can be spared him here. They
began with what may be called a club squabble at a
certain Cafe Laurent, which was much frequented by
literary men, and where Rousseau indulged in lampoons
on his companions. A shower of libellous and sometimes
obscene verses was written by or attributed to him, and
at last he was practically turned out of the cafe. At the
same time his poems, as yet only singly printed or in
manuscript, acquired him a great reputation, and not
unjustly, for Rousseau is certainly the best French writer
of serious lyrics between Racine and Chenier. He had in
1701 been made a member of the Acad6mie des Inscrip¬
tions ; he had been offered, though he had not accepted,
profitable places in the revenue department; he had
become a favourite of the libertine but not uninfluential
coterie of the Temple; and in 1710 he presented himself
as a candidate for the Academic Frangaise. Then began
the second chapter (the first had lasted ten years) of a
history of the animosities of authors which is almost the
strangest though not the most important on record. A
copy of verses, more offensive than ever, was handed to the
original object of Rousseau’s jealousy, and, getting wind,
occasioned the bastinadoing of the reputed author by a
certain La Faye or La Faille, a soldier who was reflected
S E A U
on. Legal proceedings of various kinds followed, and
Rousseau either had or thought he had ground for ascrib¬
ing the lampoon to Joseph Saurin. More law ensued,
and the end of it was that in 1712 Rousseau, not appear¬
ing, was condemned par contumace to perpetual exile. He
actually suffered it, remaining for the rest of his life in
foreign countries except for a short time in 1738, when he
returned clandestinely to Paris to try for a recall. It
should be said that he might have had this if he had not
steadfastly protested his innocence and refused to accept a
mere pardon. No one has ever completely cleared up the
story, and it must be admitted that, except as exhibiting
very strikingly the strange idiosyncrasies of the 18th
century in France, and as having affected the fortunes of
a man of letters of some eminence, it is not worth much
attention.
Rousseau’s good and ill luck did not cease with his
exile. First Prince Eugene and then other persons of dis¬
tinction took him under their protection, and he printed
at Soleure the first edition of his poetical works. But by
fault or misfortune he still continued to quarrel. Voltaire
and he met at Brussels in 1722, and, though Voltaire had
hitherto pretended or felt a great admiration for him,
something happened which turned this admiration into
hatred. Voltaire’s Le Pour et Le Centre is said to have
shocked Rousseau, who expressed his sentiments freely.
At any rate the latter had thenceforward no fiercer enemy
than Voltaire. Rousseau, however, was not much affected
by Voltaire’s enmity, and pursued for nearly twenty years
a life of literary work, of courtiership, and of rather
obscure speculation and business. Although he never
made his fortune, it does not seem that he was ever in
want. When he died his death had the singular result of
eliciting from a poetaster, Lefranc de Pompignan, an ode
of real excellence and perhaps better than anything of
Rousseau’s own work. That work, however, has high
merits, and is divided, roughly speaking, into two strangely
contrasted divisions. One consists of formal and partly
sacred odes and cantates of the stiffest character, the other
of brief epigrams, sometimes licentious and always or
almost always ill-natured. In the latter class of work
Rousseau is only inferior to his friend Piron. In the
former he stands almost alone. The frigidity of conven¬
tional diction and the disuse of all really lyrical rhythm
which characterize his period do not prevent his odes and
cantates from showing true poetical faculty, grievously
cramped no doubt, but still existing.
Besides the Soleure edition mentioned above, Rousseau published
(visiting England for the purpose) another issue of his work at
London in 1723. The chief edition since is that of Amar in 1820.
M. A. de Latour has published (Paris, Gamier, 1869) a useful
though not complete edition, with notes of merit and a biographical
introduction which would have been better if the facts had been
more punctually and precisely stated.
ROUSSEAU, Jean Jacques (1712-1778), was born at
Geneva on the 28th June 1712. His family had estab¬
lished themselves in that city at the time of the religious
wars, but they were of pure French origin. Rousseau’s
father Isaac was a watchmaker; his mother, Suzanne
Bernard, was the daughter of a minister; she died in
childbirth, and Rousseau, who was the second son, was
brought up in a very haphazard fashion, his father being
a dissipated, violent-tempered, and foolish person. He,
however, taught him to read early, and seems to have laid
the foundation of the flighty sentimentalism in morals and
politics which Rousseau afterwards illustrated with his
genius. When the boy was ten years old his father got
entangled in a disgraceful brawl and fled from Geneva,
apparently without troubling himself about Jean Jacques.
The father and son had little more to do with each other
and rarely met. Rousseau was, however, taken charge of
1 Montague House stood on the site of the British Museum.