Et in Arcadia ego: The Cone of Confusion

What should we say of a man who claims to judge Homer’s Iliad, Racine’s Phèdre or Poussin’s Deluge as if they were stews or hams? – J.J. Rousseau, Letter to Père Lesage, 1754

Le cimetière marin, Paul Valéry, 1927

1.

Valéry once said, while wandering among his neighbours’ graves, that the future, like everything else, was no longer quite what it used to be.

Do not aspire to immortal life, he thought, drawing on his pipe. Make what you can of the possible. Exhaust the realm of the possible.

Then, looking out at the boat sails kindling and flashing offshore in the midday sun, he stumbled on a stone and fell, and the lit pipe, a gift from an admirer, flew from his mouth, scattering burning ash. As he lay on the ground, dazed, in pain, his eyes took in the fullness of the sky, and he saw there written the incandescent lines of his epitaph.

This tranquil rooftop, where the doves march, 
throbs among the pines, throbs among the tombs; 
Just gone noon, the flames compose 
The sea, the sea — always renewed! 
O recompense after a thought, 
A long look at the calm of the gods!

---

(Valéry also once said, “One must always apologise for speaking about painting.” But why stop there? Shouldn’t we apologise every time we open our mouths?)

Nicolas Poussin, L'Hiver ou Le Déluge, 1660

2.

The serpent is trying to escape.”

“There is no escape.”

The two men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his pupil, Abbé de Saint-Pierre, are standing on the second floor of the Luxembourg Palace, which re-opened three days earlier as a museum. After the Revolution, it will become the principal residence of Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the French Republic. Today it is home to the French Senate. Giant canvases by Rubens once graced the walls in the western wing. Tony Blunt was the first to identify them.

“The snake is the most slippery and ambiguous of animals,” says Rousseau. “The Romans understood this, and so did their faithful son and heir Poussin. It is the tempter, the antichrist, the phallus, the creature of rebirth, shedding its old skin, regenerating a new one. And it is the creature of death, death’s harbinger, and the limbless soul of the departed, slithering up from the dark earth each night to steal food from the funerary urns. But here, in the great levelling flood, despite its twisting and coiling, it is powerless.”

“Your eyes are fixed on the snake,” says de Saint-Pierre. “And it’s true, it has braced itself against the gaining water and the rising tide, and the sight of it is as repulsive as it is hypnotising. Its slipperiness makes us shudder, its coiling undulations freeze us to the spot. We cannot take our eyes off it. We are paralysed with fear and fascination. But there seems to me to be a more striking character: the child on the rock that the father is handing down to his wife. This child trying to steady itself on the cliff face with its tiny legs. ”

“The soul is seized by the sight: in the midst of the crimes of the earth, the overflowing waters, the distant thunder, the dark day punishing the crimes of the earth, the spectacle of innocence itself subject to these same crimes, and that of paternal love, more powerful than the love of life.”

“Oh yes, it is the child, there is no doubt, it is the child who is the main object,” says Rousseau.

In a later discussion, however, Rousseau will say, “It is the only painting that has ever moved me. The first time that I saw it I was so impressed I went back up the stairs to see it again; I could not take my eyes off this mother who thinks only of saving her child by lifting it up onto the cliff before they both perish.”

De Saint-Pierre disagrees again. “The father is the main subject of the action, the mother is preoccupied with her own survival. Everyone else is worried about surviving, but paternal love is more powerful than self-preservation.”

“The father, the mother, the child. This is the true Holy Trinity. And at the same time, is it not like the snake, the Ouroboros devouring its own tail?”

Rousseau then says, “I looked at it a whole hour and could not leave it even though it filled my soul with the most intense bitterness. I could feel the whole of nature suffering there. I had it for a long time in front of my eyes. Oh, I could not stay in a room with that painting: I should be overcome by a mortal sadness. If I owned it I would die of sadness just looking at it, at all that it is tied up in it, including this giant grass snake that the painter depicts escaping up the rock, demonstrating the general terror of all animals in this great catastrophe.”

De Saint-Pierre: “Yes, and we foolish mortals stand here, contemplating the horror, forgetting that Noah’s flood has never subsided, that three quarters of this miserable orb are still swallowed by it.”

3.

The soul, seized by the sight. Only the religious understand the proper response. The naked breasts of Titian’s first Penitent Magdalena move them to pity, not desire. The others, where she is clothed, where the Bible is present, where the skull rests upon a prie-dieu, have no effect. They are pointless.

4.

Darwin believed that if you stopped using a part of the body, or if something was removed from it, the chance of that part reappearing in subsequent generations is reduced. Many elements of our human form – those, for example, used by other species to move the ear to locate potential dangers – no longer serve any biological function. They can, however, be developed. The node on the helix of the outer ear – “Darwin's tubercle” – is thought to be vestigial, or perhaps just dormant. It is found in around 10% of the population – a much higher incidence than epilepsy. The orbitalis muscle, which other species use to push forward the eye, to better focus its attentions, is thought to be a vestigial eye muscle in humans. It too can be developed. Other human organs frequently described as vestigial: the tail bone, the belly button, the male nipple, the glans penis, the labia minora, the ovarian follicles and the clitoris.

Darwin called the “provisional hypothesis” for this mechanism “pangenesis”, which posits the inheritance of hereditary atomic particles called gemmules, transmitted from one generation to the next. If a chunk of the body is removed – the frontal lobe, for example, or a canine on the upper-right jaw, or the foreskin – the procreator cannot send its inheritance signal to the offspring, and so the excised bit disappears:

Godron remarks that different races of man have from time immemorial knocked out their incisors, cut off joints of their fingers, made holes of immense size through the lobes of their ears or through their nostrils, tattooed themselves, made deep gashes in various parts of their bodies, and there is no reason to suppose that these mutilations have ever been inherited.^⁠¹ Adhesions due to inflammation and pits from the small-pox (and formerly many consecutive generations must have been thus pitted) are not inherited. With respect to Jews, I have been assured by three medical men of the Jewish faith that circumcision, which has been practiced for so many ages, has produced no inherited effect. Blumenbach, however, asserts that Jews are often born in Germany in a condition rendering circumcision difficult, so that a name is given them signifying “born circumcised;” and Professor Preyer informs me that this is the case in Bonn, such children being considered the special favourites of Jehovah. I have also heard from Dr A. Newman, of Guy's Hospital, of the grandson of a circumcised Jew, the father not having been circumcised, in a similar condition. But it is possible that all these cases may be accidental coincidences, for Sir J. Paget has seen five sons of a lady and one son of her sister with adherent prepuces; and one of these boys was affected in a manner “which might be considered like that commonly produced by circumcision;” yet there was no suspicion of Jewish blood in the family of these two sisters. Circumcision is practiced by Muhammadans, but at a much later age than by Jews; and Dr Riedel, Assistant Resident in North Celebes, writes to me that the boys there go naked until from six to ten years old; and he has observed that many of them, though not all, have their prepuces much reduced in length, and this he attributes to the inherited effects of the operation. In the vegetable kingdom oaks and other trees have borne galls from primeval times, yet they do not produce inherited excrescences; and many other such facts could be adduced. Notwithstanding the above several negative cases, we now possess conclusive evidence that the effects of operations are sometimes inherited.”^⁠

– Charles Darwin, The variation of animals and plants under domestication, 1875.

Further, the genitalia of male and female foetuses have the ability to fully or partially form the observable characteristics of the opposite biological sex if, during foetal development, they are exposed to too many or too few androgens or to too much or too little of the sex-determining region Y protein.

For souls it is death to become water, and for water death to become earth. Water comes into existence out of earth, and soul out of water. – Heraclitus, Fragment 504, 1 BCE.

5.

The Titans believed that Deucalion built an ark on the advice of his father Prometheus, who Zeus, angered by the hubris of Lycaon and his sons, had warned of the coming flood. Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha floated for nine days and nights, and then landed on the summit of Mount Parnassus. The rains ceased. Deucalion made sacrifices to Zeus, who told him to throw stones behind him, which became men. The stones Pyrrha threw became women.

The Greek Laos (λᾱός, 'people') comes from laas ('stone').

The myth of Tiresias involves two snakes, which he saw coupling, and wounded with a stick. As punishment, Hera, the jealous sister and wife of Zeus, turned him into a woman. Seven years later, having married and given birth to several children, he returned to the scene of his transformation, and seeing the same two snakes again copulating as before, was changed back into a man.

Johann Ulrich Kraus, c. 1690.

6.

“The snake, we could say (bearing in mind Poussin’s politics, and their rootedness in a certain view of an ordre déterminé in nature), is an egalitarian body, a body without established hierarchy one of its constituents; a body in which the senses hardly seem to be located or concentrated in specific organs – with other parts clearly subordinate in terms of sense, only dimly or rudimentary sensate, having as their function more lowly tasks of say, digestion or circulation, or more basic ones of maintaining organic integrity or equilibrium. In the snake everything is sensate and animate, apparently, and this is the clue to its love of involution – its touching and coiling and circling back on itself – as if it needed, as part of its life, to enjoy its own fluidity.” – T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death, 2006

Nicolas Poussin, Un serpent, 1630

7.

Rousseau was bludgeoned to death – three quick blows to the head with a blunt instrument. Few people know this, have heard this, fewer still believe it. They buried him in a tomb modelled on the one in The Arcadian Shepherds (Et in Arcadia ego) in the Louvre, on an island linked to the riverbank by a footbridge and surrounded by a hundred trembling aspens.

On the overcast morning of his death he set off for his walk earlier than usual. It was not yet six, the sun was just up. Amable, the ten-year-old nephew of the marquis who usually accompanied him on these strolls – he called the boy his petit gouverneur – was asleep, as was everyone else in the Girardin household. What did he see in the forest? What were his thoughts? There was a breeze. The air was cool. Birds were singing. He returned at eight, whistling, his pockets filled with leaves and catkins.

“The gardens are glorious,” he said to the marquis, who was next to the cottage, consulting with one of the English gardeners. “I have composed a new song in its honour. Tonight, dear René, you shall play it on the spinet, and I shall sing its verses to the family.”

The cottage was on the Ile des Peupliers, in the back-end of the gardens, the wildest part of the estate. It had white walls and a thatched roof and is modelled on Julie’s “Élysée” in La Nouvelle Héloïse.

“He was demonstrably happy,” the marquis later told the prévôt. “His cheeks were flushed and there was a spring to his step. I had never seen him so finely animated. Straight away, we sat down to a hearty breakfast in the cottage – hearty by his birdlike standards. We discussed music; he had recently begun revising his theory of melody.”

8.

Rousseau thought that the most beautiful chords, like the most beautiful colours, can convey to the senses a pleasant sensation and nothing more. But the accents of the voice pass all the way to the soul; for they are the natural expression of the passions, and by depicting them they arouse them.

It is by means of them that music becomes oratorical, eloquent, imitative, they form its language; it is by means of them that it depicts objects to the imagination, that it conveys feelings to the heart. Melody is in music what design is in Painting, harmony produces merely the effect of colours. It is by means of the song, not by means of the chords, that sounds have expression, fire, life; it is the song alone that gives them the moral effects that produce all of Music's energy. In a word, the physical part alone of the art is reduced to very little and harmony does not pass beyond that.

One might as well do so if one wanted to compare the charms of ravishing music – which brings to the heart the turmoil of all passions and the voluptuousness of all feelings – with the crude and purely physical sensation of the palate when eating food. What a difference the movements of the soul make between trained and untrained men! A Pergolesi, a Voltaire, a Titian, will, so to speak, dispose of the hearts of an enlightened people as they please; but the peasant who is insensitive to the masterpieces of these great men finds nothing so beautiful as the popular literature of the Bibliothèque bleue, the beer signs and the jangling rhythms of his village.

9.

Rousseau’s companion, Thérèse Levasseur, a former seamstress in his father’s employ, was also at the breakfast table. They had been together for 30 years. She bore him five children, all sent as new-borns to the Hospital des Enfants-Trouvés in Paris. She was fifty-four. He was sixty-six. She had been unfaithful to him several times, once during a carriage ride in the south of England with James Boswell.

This morning, she stared blankly into her coffee cup and did not speak. She had been ill; her failing health was the reason for their departure from Paris. This was their forty-second day at the chateau. She hated the foul blowing winds and the sounds of the birds. The marquis later reported that the couple’s relations had become strained.

“I excused myself as soon as it was politic to do so,” the marquis later told his wife.

Once alone, the philosopher turned to his spouse.

“Thérèse,” he said, “take this money and pay the locksmith. I have not yet settled accounts with him. Don’t ask for a lower price. He is an honest man.”

Thérèse got up and left.

An hour later, the marquis, with his Scottish architect, heard cries coming from the cottage. The two men hastened to the door and either kicked it in or opened it with a passkey. There, inside, the philosopher, the father of romanticism, the teacher whose treatise on natural education radically changed ideas of child-rearing, the key figure in the development of modern democratic thought, the theorist who formed the intellectual basis for all modern authoritarianism, was lying face down on the stone floor. Thérèse, the ailing seamstress who had coupled with the valet the night before (they will be married within the year) and with James Boswell 13 times in one night 10 years earlier, was kneeling next to him, covered in his blood.

The marquis turned over the body. There was a large wound on its forehead.

10.

It is an island in the middle of the ocean of what Freud called the “dark continent”. It is the only organ exclusively for pleasure. It serves no reproductive purpose. It is autonomous, self-sufficient.

Its etymology is unclear. “Small pebble,” say some. “To sheathe,” or “to shut” say others. “A key, a latch or a hook (to close a door).”

Its internal and external anatomy was not fully discovered until 2005. It did not appear in French textbooks until 2019. More than 200 million girls and women alive in 2021 had theirs cut from their bodies. Intersex new-borns are similarly mutilated.

It was not discovered until last year that females snakes are so endowed. Before, they were mistaken for scent glands. In some they are of considerable size, taking up most of the anterior tail region. In the death adder, it is shaped like two teardrops, and forms a love heart structure.

According to Hesiod… when Hera and Zeus disputed whether the pleasures of love are felt more by women or by men, they referred to Tiresias for a decision. He said that if the pleasures of love be reckoned at ten, men enjoy one and women nine. Wherefore Hera blinded him, but Zeus bestowed on him the art of soothsaying.

“The saying of Tiresias to Zeus and Hera.
Of ten parts a man enjoys one only;
But a woman enjoys the full ten parts in her heart.”
He also lived to a great age.

– Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, 1-2 AD, translated by Frazer, with the following footnote:

According to Eustathius and Tzetzes, it was by killing the female snake that Tiresias became a woman, and it was by afterwards killing the male snake that he was changed back into a man. According to Ovid, the seer remained a woman for seven years, and recovered his male sex in the eighth.

11.

Earlier, during his walk in the forest, Rousseau’s thoughts had turned to the charity concert he had attended with David Hume at the Foundling Hospital in London in 1865. The oratorio, by Handel, a Governor of the Hospital, who had died six years earlier half-blind after a carriage accident and a botched cataract operation, was sung by the blind children only. The philosopher had been unable to focus his attentions on the music.

The art held little interest for him, either, except, perhaps, the gin drinkers and the young, cowering Moses by Hogarth, and the terracotta bust of Handel by the Huguenot Roubillac.

Handel was buried with state honours in Westminster Abbey. Almost four thousand people attended his funeral. The image Rousseau conjured of this event frightened and aroused him. The trees were swaying gently in the breeze. The screeching of the birds was deafening.

“He is plainly mad,” Hume said two weeks after the concert, “after having long been maddish.”

"When you want to study men, you have to look closely at yourself; but to study man, you first have to observe the differences in order to discover the essential properties" – J.J. Rousseau, Essay on the origin of languages, in which melody and musical imitation are discussed, 1755

12.

He had refused every request to sit for Houdon. The last had arrived in May; the sculptor had just finished his bust of Benjamin Franklin and had almost completed his first Voltaire – one of the philosopher’s many nemeses – who, conveniently for the entrepreneurial artist, had died just days before. Voltaire had sat for Houdon in February, upon his return to Paris after two decades of exile in Switzerland. Crowds were already assembling at the sculptor’s studio to view the work. To capitalize on the demand, Houdon reproduced the bust with different hairstyles and dresses and in a full range of materials – terracotta, plaster, marble and bronze.

Marie-Gabrielle Capet, Houdon with Voltaire’s bronze bust, 1818

“A natural death,” the death certificate and provost’s report will pronounce, caused by a “serious apoplexy.” Thérèse, the marquis, the marquise, two friends of the Girardin family and the subsequent autopsy report will concur. The wound on his forehead will be said to have occurred when he fell face forward from his chair onto the stone floor.

Rumours will circulate – people will say that the wound was self-inflicted, that he shot himself in the forehead with a pistol. This will come from Holbach first, then from the pen of the Baroness de Staël: “He may be permitted to have committed suicide without remorse, because he was too alone in the vastness of the universe.... One day, in the dark woods, he said: ‘I am isolated on earth, I suffer, I'm unhappy without my life to serve it: I can die.’”

Others will dispute this “fiction worthy of her talent, but not of her judgement.” Others still will talk of murder.

Houdon is sent for. A death mask will be made, from which a plaster bust, painted to look like terra cotta, will be hastily assembled. Bronzes and marbles will follow. Houdon will sell most of these paired with matching busts of Voltaire – togas and hair bands, Rousseau's dead gaze lifted toward the spiritual beyond, Voltaire's focussed on the ground.

Two days later, Rousseau will be buried in an oak coffin encased and triple-lined with lead, at midnight, by torchlight. The Girardin estate will become a jardin du souvenir. The tomb, designed by the painter and architect Hubert Robert and sculpted by Le Sueur, will become the most famous grave in the world. Marie Antoinette will press her bare breast against the cold stone. Thomas Jefferson will make a special pèlerinage to it, as will Robespierre and Napoleon.

Girardin and his wife will be put under house arrest. Their children will be imprisoned. The chateau and gardens will be pillaged. Rousseau’s mortal remains will be unearthed and transferred to Paris. Musicians from the new “Ecoles des Jeunes Français” will lead the procession. Crowds will line the road, entire villages will stand in the ditches to watch the passing cortege. “Long live the Republic!” they will cry, waving their fists in the air. “Long live the memory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau!” A giant crowd carrying flaming torches will fill the Tuileries. The coffin will be placed on a bier semi-circled with willows. The next morning, the huge entourage of mourners and celebrants will proceed to the Pantheon, led by United States Navy Captain Joshua Barney, who will proudly wave the American flag, behind which the rest will follow.

James Monroe, the future fifth President of the United States (and one of three to die on Independence Day), will be the only foreigner allowed to witness the ceremony inside the Pantheon.

The Bourbons will return to power. The Pantheon will once again become a Catholic abbey dedicated to St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris. What is left of her reliquary châsse, a forearm and a few fingers and toes – the rest torched the year before at the place de Grève – will be re-installed in the crypt. Vengeful priests will desecrate the tombs of Rousseau and Voltaire. Their corpses will be thrown into a potter's field. They will be retrieved, and returned to the crypt. On December 18, 1897, a commission will examine the remains. The report will state that the two tombs were opened in the presence of this commission, and here is what was reported concerning Rousseau: “The skeleton of Jean Jacques Rousseau is in a perfect state of preservation, the arms crossed on the breast, and the head slightly inclined towards the left like a man sleeping. The skull is intact; there is no indication of it being perforated or fractured.”

A professor of anthropology at the Paris Museum of Natural History will publish a letter in Le Soir expressing doubts as to the authenticity of the skeleton found in Rousseau's tomb. “What happened to the wound on the forehead,” he will ask. Sixteen years later, the Houdon death mask will be re-examined by its then owner (it is now part of the permanent collection of the Rousseau Museum in Geneva, the birthplace of the philosopher), Dr Julien Raspail.

What follows is an excerpt from his paper, published in La Chronique médicale in 1912:

“The wound (on the forehead) comes out very clearly on this mask... (but) the face shows two other wounds, which those who have examined the mask have passed over unperceived. One of these is near the right eye... the marked deformations of the external parts of this eye arc fully explained by the neighbouring contusion... The third wound is on the nose. The upper portion of this wound is of a horseshoe shape and descends along the left side of the nose, where the fractured bone is laid bare... The traumatic origin of this disfigurement cannot be doubted. In Latour's pastel, the nose is well drawn and comes out clearly. No deformity of any kind is visible. We know that Rousseau had a well-formed nose. For instance, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, in his detailed description of Rousseau's physiognomy, refers to his “well-made nose.” But in this death-mask, one is struck by the deformity just mentioned. When one considers these three wounds, the first peculiarity which occurs to the mind is their parallel direction; the second is their respective situation. If, as was stated by Thérèse Levasseur and M. de Girardin, the wound on the forehead was made by falling forward from his chair, the salient parts of Rousseau's face would alone have shown the effects of this fall. But nothing of the kind is found on Rousseau's very high eyebrows nor on the point of the nose... It is the receding parts of the face which were hurt – the retreating forehead, the side of the nose, and the still more protected parts, the base of the nose and the under part of the right eye. Again, two of these wounds are on the right side of the face, while the third is on the left side. Now, it is stated that when Rousseau fell from his chair, he fell dead, and so could not have made the movements necessary to produce these wounds. The similarity in the shape of the wounds is also remarkable... it is evident that the blows were produced by the same blunt instrument, (but) it is not so easy to say what this instrument was. It might have been the small end of a hammer flattened by long use.

What was the gravity of these wounds? That of the right eye was not serious. That on the nose was deeper but it did not produce dangerous results, nothing beyond an abundant haemorrhage. The only one of the three wounds which counts was that of the forehead. Did it effect only the soft tissues or did it effect the structure of the cranium?... It is plain that this blow crushed in the skull at this point and caused Rousseau's death. In other words, Jean Jacques Rousseau was assassinated. Thérèse Levasseur, was, as we have already seen, the only person who saw Rousseau die, and she has given four different versions of the event. But it is impossible that a woman of her mental calibre could have constructed the long accounts which she is said to have furnished of what Rousseau said and all the incidents preceding his death. Her memory could not have held them and her mind could not have coordinated them. All those persons who were intimate with Rousseau and his household agree in pronouncing Thérèse to have been dull to a degree. Rousseau himself in his Confessions paints her in these same colours. The statements given out at the castle must have emanated from M. de Girardin. Now, it is well known that his word could not be depended upon and it has often been shown that many things which he said about Rousseau were inexact. In this respect, Thérèse Levasseur was still more unreliable. She was a woman without morals and was never sincerely attached to Rousseau. His friends paint her in the very worst light. She was not faithful to him and he complained of this more than once and even threatened, on this account, to put an end to their relation. Just before his death, her conduct with a valet in the service of M. de Girardin was especially open to criticism and caused Rousseau the profoundest sorrow.

Statements coming from such a source are worthless. The assertion that Rousseau poisoned himself is no longer made. That he shot himself with a pistol cannot be accepted after an examination of Houdon's death-mask. It reveals none of the well-known signs of a pistol shot, none whatsoever. Nor is there any solid proof that he died a natural death. In the description by those who were near him of the cause of his death, of his state of health at that moment, are none of the symptoms of serous apoplexy, called to-day an acute attack of uraemia. And the clumsy statements of the autopsy also render this explanation improbable. Assassination is the only way out of the difficulty. But who would and could have killed Rousseau? Why, Thérèse Levasseur, of course.

The trembling poplar, known as the Waverly in Britain, is the tree of violas, and the wood on which Poussin’s Deluge is painted. It is used for camembert cheese boxes. It has a short lifespan.

Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego, 1638-40

1. Nevertheless Mr. Wetherell states, 'Nature,' Dec. 1870, p. 168, that when he visited 15 years ago the Sioux Indians, he was informed “by a physician, who has passed much of his time with these tribes, that sometimes a child was born with these marks. This was confirmed by the U.S. Government Indian Agent.”