Who killed JJR?

Did Jean-Jacques Rousseau fall, shoot himself, or was he bludgeoned to death?

“What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: 'Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!'” — Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

He set off on 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 – he called the boy his petit gouverneur – was asleep, as was everyone else in the Girardin household.

What did he see in the forest? He probably followed the flight and songs of birds. In Confessions, he described how their freedom and innocence charmed him, and how he envied their melodic happiness.

Birds never deceive us, they operate according to their own consistent and authentic laws, without malice, trickery, or falsehood, from instinct and necessity, not from deceit or artifice, and in their purity, they offer us inassailable truth. They sing, migrate, and build nests according to their nature; they do not pretend or disguise their intentions, for they are models of authenticity, and it is only through our own self-deception that we fail to see them as they truly are.

What else? There was a breeze. The air was cool. He returned at eight, whistling their songs, 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. A footbridge linked it to the riverbank. It was modelled on Julie’s “Élysée” in Rousseau’s epistolary novel 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.”¹

His companion, Thérèse Levasseur, a former seamstress in his father’s employ, was also at the table. She was fifty-four. He was sixty-six. They had been together for thirty years. Rousseau described her as “more than a sister, more than a mother, more than a friend, more even than a mistress, and it was for that reason that she was not a mistress”.

From The Confessions:

I found in Thérèse the complement I needed; through her I lived as happily as I could be, given the course of events. At first, I wanted to develop her mind: my efforts were wasted. Her mind is what nature made it; cultivation and care have no effect on it… She has never been able to recite the twelve months of the year in order, and does not know a single number, despite all my efforts to teach her. She cannot count money, nor the price of anything… But this person, so limited and, if you like, so stupid, gives excellent advice in difficult situations. Often in Switzerland, in England, in France, in catastrophes I found myself in, she saw what I did not see myself; she gave me the best advice to follow; she saved me from dangers into which I was blindly rushing; and before ladies of the highest rank, before the great and princes, her feelings, her good sense, her answers and her conduct earned her universal esteem; and for me, on her merit, compliments whose sincerity I felt.

With people we love, feeling nourishes the mind as well as the heart, and one has little need to seek ideas elsewhere. I lived with my Thérèse as pleasantly as with the greatest genius in the world.

Thérèse had been unfaithful to him several times, once during a carriage ride in the South of England with James Boswell. During their years together, she gave birth to five children, all of whom were sent as newborns to the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés in Paris.