Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/35

Rh treatment of skies with crude blues and orange, and liis chiaroscuro usually is much exaggerated. On his return to Paris he soon became distinguished as a painter, and was employed by Louis XIV. 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 Eousseau 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 Avith 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 Academie 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 Academie Franchise. 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 Montague House stood on the site of the British Museum. 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 Contre 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, Eousseau 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 bora at Geneva on the 28th June. 17 12. 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, Avas 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

