The Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague (1790); Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (1676)

Two English ladies, living two generations apart, travel half the world in pursuance of their husbands' careers. Lady Mary made a circuit from London through the Low Countries to Austria to Hungary to the Ottoman capital, and from there via the Mediterranean to north Africa, Italy, and thence to Paris and then home; all this over the course of about two years, 1716-1718, while her husband was an ambassador. In the 1650s and 1660s, Lady Fanshawe covered less ground but also had a rougher time of it, for the English Civil War you might say crafted her itinerary. Her husband, later the baronet Sir Richard Fanshawe, sided with the monarchy against Oliver Cromwell, and so the couple spent a great deal of time during the Commonwealth beating about from England to the Netherlands to France to Spain -- anywhere royal heads were still safe -- raising money for the dispossessed prince who, on Cromwell's death, became King Charles II.

Both women wrote books which, if not timeless repositories of wisdom, are nevertheless remarkable time capsules of life and adventure in their respective eras. Lady Mary's Letters are the more interesting to read, since she was a better, indeed a delightful writer who not only performed at concert pitch for an audience of great friends like Alexander Pope himself, but also carefully chose and polished what she wanted posterity to see. Her book only came out decades after her death. She was probably a fun person to be around, too, if perhaps a little snooty. She loves being the clear-eyed, liberated and logical Protestant Englishwoman, asking tough questions of the friars showing her holy relics in Bavarian churches. If the church possesses, for instance, both the mantle of a saint and a silver-plated griffin's claw, does that mean the griffin was also a saint? Her host smiled abashedly.

Lady Fanshawe, however, probably led a more interesting life, at least to the reader sitting in comfort and clicking through her Memoirs on a Kindle. (What would the ladies have thought about that?) In old age, she wrote in firm but somewhat pedestrian style of all the things that had happened to her on her travels, almost week by week, for years. She wrote for her one surviving son, so there are many family details that he could have untangled better than we can do. She seems to have had no desire to please a fretful posterity with gay, polished summations: these memoirs were meant to honor her late husband, and so she fleshed out anything and everything that concerned him, right down to the apparently photographic memories of official state ceremonies (he was an ambassador, too), and to what guards wore which uniforms, and what the people lining the dusty roads, cheering, looked like.

Yet what with the travel and the narrow escapes and the forged passports, the shipwrecks and the perpetual hunt for money, one wonders how the former Ann Harrison herself stood it. Perhaps she found it wonderfully "interesting" too, and all for the service of a noble and godly prince. Perhaps seventeenth century Englishwomen were simply made of sterner stuff than we can imagine. I would think after a while, the adventures would simply turn ghastly, and the reward of reaching a career in the wasp's nest of Stuart diplomacy, only to find betrayal and disgrace there, would finally break anyone's spirit. The twenty pregnancies added in must have been small help in times of family turmoil. (For her part Lady Mary, in the course of her Letters, appears to have had two.) Six miscarriages, including a set of triplet boys, fourteen births, withal four survivals to adulthood: Lady Fanshawe recounts them all, and notes in every case when death happened and where "my son" or "my daughter" is buried. For one decade-long stretch, she lost a child, on average, every two years.

It's best to let these ladies speak for themselves, but before listening to them, it's also wise to note one way in which both their eras now overlap our own. It lies in their experience of Islam. For several centuries now, we Westerners, we Americans especially, have been able to develop an amnesia about Islam because we have not much encountered it. Until very recently, the U.S. Marines' hymn's lyrics about "the shores of Tripoli" might have been the only (and beyond oblique) reference to Islam remotely a part of American life. We are accustomed instead to religion as a sedate, gentle human construct -- each one a part of the civic fabric -- and to understanding that everyone simply agrees, one day a week, to let one another worship peacefully where all choose, all faiths being essentially the same: benign.

Islam is different, and our ancestors saw it. Lady Fanshawe, sailing from England to the safety of the Continent circa 1650, knew that the approach of a Turkish vessel meant the real threat of a combat, capture, and slavery. "When we had just passed the Straits, we saw coming towards us, with full sails, a Turkish galley well manned, and we believed we should all be carried away slaves ...." She was not a hyperventilating Islamophobe. The Muslim slave trade was vigorous to say the very least. Two generations later, Lady Mary traveled and lived in the Ottoman Empire as a distinguished guest, made great progress in learning Turkish and appears also to have made polite noises when her hosts encouraged her to study "alcoran." She wrote, for public consumption, glowing descriptions of splendidly rich, beautiful cool Turkish homes sumptuously appointed in rare woods and and glowing fabrics, all plashing with fountains, and of fields and gardens blooming in the warm Mediterranean January; she wrote of her cloistered friend, the enchanting Fatima, exquisite and serene.

But she also traveled through the wild Serbian countryside in company with "bassas," imperial Ottoman officials, and their guards, the "janizaries" (slave soldiers, originally kidnapped Christian boys forcibly converted to Islam), both of whom preyed grotesquely on the helpless Serbian peasants. They slaughtered their animals, ate their food, and then charged them "teeth-money," "a contribution for the use of their teeth, worn with doing them the honour of devouring their meat. ... the wretched owners durst not put in their claim, for fear of being beaten." She notes that all this oppression is owing the "natural corruption of a military government, their religion not allowing of this barbarity, any more than ours does." Here, she is wrong. The bassas and the janizaries could certainly have pointed to Islam's laws demanding the jeziya, the tax levied on infidels for being infidels.

And in a section of letters at the end of the book, which seem to have been intended to remain private (from Letter LIII forward -- "Footnote, this and the following letters are now first published"), she is even less sanguine about the wonders of Muslim civilization. Men go in terror of "the vile spirit of their government," which "stifles genius, damps curiosity, and suppresses an hundred passions." Women go in terror of men.

The luscious passion of the seraglio is the only one almost that is gratified here to the full; but it is blended so with the surly spirit of despotism in one of the parties, and with the dejection and anxiety which this spirit produces in the other, that ... it cannot appear otherwise than as a very mixed kind of enjoyment.

Even the lovely Fatima herself is of startling parentage. She is the daughter of a Polish Christian woman, kidnapped and enslaved in one of the many running battles the Ottoman Turks fought in eastern Europe, always lunging for more conquest -- more jihad. Mind you, this was long after the Crusades. They had only just been beaten back from Vienna in 1683, about halfway through our two ladies' flourishings. The date of that Muslim defeat was September 11.

It is all part of a pattern that we have had the luxury of forgetting, a historical truth that was delivered to our attention in short doses during the 1980s and 1990s, and then with ferocious confidence on another September 11. This historical truth is not that Muslims are awful people; it is that Islam is the only major world faith which demands the subjugation of all non-believers, period. When its most passionate adherents take the mandate seriously, war, conquest, enslavement, punitive taxes, and the raising of mosques on other people's sacred sites are the norm. Two vigorous, educated women, living in the most civilized cities in Europe three and four hundred years ago, saw normative Islam in action on their travels in Europe. They recorded it, matter-of-factly. Pay attention to these voices, for, not only can they help cure us of our pleasant and dangerous amnesia, but the more you read in old books, the more you'll find these ladies are just two of a surprisingly large company of witnesses.

But, we said we would let them speak for themselves. They did take notice of less deadly subjects. They enjoyed audiences with royal personages, cast a jaundiced eye over other women's dresses and hair, attended archery demonstrations among court ladies, went to the opera. The great disadvantage of reading on a Kindle is that you cannot ruffle back and forth through the pages. You have to click about, one little screen at a time, and you forget things. I had forgotten that Lady Mary, gadding regally about, saw the ruins -- or what she believed were the ruins -- of both Troy and Carthage. For a gentlewoman of the Augustan age and a friend of Pope, this must have been a supremely pleasing experience. And early on in her travels, she wrote with delight of Vienna as a garden spot for mature women:

A woman, till five and thirty, is only looked upon as a raw girl, and can possibly make no noise in the world, till about forty. I don't know what your ladyship may think of this matter; but 'tis a considerable comfort to me, to know there is upon earth such a paradise for old women; and I am content to be insignificant at present, in the design of returning when I am fit to appear no where else.

And as for the storm-tossed Lady Fanshawe, wife of a Stuart cavalier from the age of sixteen, this is her first meal after a shipwreck, and she's enraptured to get it:

... we sat up and made good cheer; for beds they had none, and we were so transported that we thought we had no need of any, but we had very good fires, and Nantz white wine, and butter,and milk, and walnuts and eggs, and some very bad cheese; and was not this enough, with the escape of shipwreck, to be thought better than a feast? I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoken when every word seemed to be our last.

These women lived lives, if I may mix a metaphor, at full throttle and without a safety net. Lady Fanshawe and her husband were glad to start married life with a fortune of £20 cash, which he used to buy pen and paper, the tools of his trade (diplomacy). For her part, Lady Mary wrote her friends, half-jokingly, that she hoped to survive the trip from Vienna through Hungary to Peterwaradin in Serbia, in the depths of winter, but that it would make her of necessity incommunicado for a while. Her steely, un-self-pitying address to a correspondent could sum up any one day or year that either of these two ladies ever lived through: "Adieu, dear sister: this is the last account you will have from me of Vienna. If I survive my journey, you shall hear from me again. I can say, with great truth, ... 'I have long learnt to hold myself as nothing'; but when I think of the fatigue my poor infant must suffer, I have all a mother's fondness in my eyes, and all her tender passions in my heart."

The Rape of the Lock, by Alexander Pope

One really can't review great poetry. One can only enjoy it. In high school, Pope was a ridiculous chore; now he's delightful.

"Soft yielding minds to Water glide away,
And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea."

But why does Ariel abandon the job of protecting Belinda right in the middle of the story?

"Sudden he viewed, in spite of all her art,
An earthly Lover lurking at her heart.
Amazed, confused, he found his power expired,
Resigned to fate, and with a sigh retired."

Rather an abrupt way to move the action along. And it's only Canto III.

When you have finished this, do move on to John Gay: "To a Lady, on Her Passion for Old China." The dishes, not the country.

Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding (d---- me)

This is my second go-round with Tom Jones. Of course it's splendid; I understand it's splendid. What modern writer, for example, has the brains to accomplish this? --

Hushed be every ruder breath. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains the boisterous limbs of noisy Boreas and the sharp-pointed nose of bitter-biting Eurus. Do thou, sweet Zephyrus, rising from thy fragrant bed, mount the western sky and lead on those delicious gales, the charms of which call forth the lovely Flora from her chamber, perfumed with pearly dews, when on the first of June, her birthday, the blooming maid in loose attire gently tips it over the verdant mead, where every flower rises to do her homage till the whole field becomes enamelled and colours contend with sweets which shall ravish her most (Book IV, chapter 2).

My trouble is that I get bogged down, in Tom Jones, in the long middle chapters concerning the inn or inns at Upton. We begin well, otherwise. I understand that Tom is a foundling, a fine, decent, red-blooded English boy. Out in the country among his gentry foster family and neighbors, there are only a handful of characters to keep track of. There's his foster father, Squire Allworthy, and Allworthy's sister, and the boozing and hunting and really rather awful Squire Western across the fields. There's Squire Western's lovely daughter Sophia, and Western has a sister, too, the d----d b---- who is the plague of his life now that his d----d wife is dead. Then Allworthy's sister marries one Blifil and has a son, young Blifil, who grows up to be all that is snivelling, mean, and wretched. There are parsons, tutors, and maids, and we can't forget that in eighteenth century English usage a maid was an "Abigail," just as a youngest son could be a "Benjamin" even though his name might be Hal, and a single woman over a certain age was credited with the honorific "Mrs."

So far so good. There is nothing quite like eighteenth-century English prose, as a matter of fact, and what I find especially awe-inspiring about Fielding's use of it is precisely that it is so often unstuffy. If anybody taught him the rule that one never ends a sentence with a preposition, he forgot it or didn't care. If anyone taught him that one never mixes up persons in one's narrator, he forgot that, too, or didn't care. He writes with blooming confidence, almost at dictation speed, and if amid that arch, slightly hectoring but good-natured tone, and all the rolling Latinate periods, a sentence runs on something like "reader, we think it best to inform thee, as I have hinted before, that Fate had placed the youth in a situation he couldn't get out from," Fielding leaves it all at that.

Another extraordinary thing about Fielding's work -- watch me try to imitate his confidence, and fail -- is the conversations he records among his characters, including the lower orders whom the reader might assume in real life would not speak well. Possibly our own age has gotten so lazy with language, spoken and written, that we simply can't believe anyone ever kept his mind so engaged in his own discourse, and his neighbors', that he could reel off full thoughts in good grammatical structure as a daily, an hourly, habit. The maidservant, Mrs. Honour, is my favorite, especially when she is in a self-justifying passion: " 'I don't care a farthing! I speaks no scandal of any one; but to be sure, the servants make no scruple of saying as how her ladyship meets men at another place -- where the house goes under the name of a poor gentlewoman but her ladyship pays the rent; and many's the good thing besides, they say, she hath of her.' " These conversations are extraordinary also in the way they appear on the page: not for Fielding the obvious separation of lines of dialogue, speech by speech, a dozen new little paragraphs all down the paper. Instead, the characters' confrontations are treated as whole scenes, so the reader faces huge blocks of thickly printed text which can't be skimmed over. If you want to really know who is saying what to whom, you must read, and watch out for the quotation marks or you'll get confused.

So far, so good. Tom Jones, virtuous foundling, loves Sophia, and Sophia loves him. Her father finds out and locks her up, insisting she won't get out until she marries the wretch, young Blifil, who in turn has poisoned his uncle's, Squire Allworthy's, mind against Jones and so now stands to inherit all Allworthy's fortune. Jones is kicked out of Allworthy's house. Sophia escapes to the open road with her maid, intending to throw herself upon the mercy and protection of an aunt in London. We attend our characters to the midpoint of their journey, the inn, or inns, at Upton.

Of course Fielding has to separate his lovers in some way, but here at Upton I get bogged down. The middle fourth, or perhaps third, of the book is spent here, in what seems an endless series of marches and counter-marches, most of them at night, by which Jones and Sophia stumble from one inn to another, are kept carefully apart, and yet thrown in with more characters who will play big roles in their fate in the final part of the novel. The army is here, too, for it's 1745 and the last Stuart pretender to the English monarchy, Bonnie Prince Charlie, is lurking about or his "rebels" are. There are plenty of soldiers for the hot-blooded Jones to get in fights with, and Sophia is briefly mistaken for Jenny Cameron, famous mistress of the prince. In the middle of all this Jones meets the mysterious Man of the Hill, a recluse who tells a long story about his past misfortunes and then disappears.

Eventually we leave Upton and attend our hero and heroine to London. The hailstorm of new characters whom we had met -- landladies, ensigns, post boys, parlor maids -- now becomes a tornadic blizzard of even newer characters in "town." Lords, ladies, lawyers, husbands, wives (or not), Mrs. Miller and her daughters, Mrs. Miller's daughter's beau, Mrs. Miller's cousin who turns out to be the highwayman who had accosted Jones outside Upton, and all along Mrs. Miller has been well acquainted with Squire Allworthy plus I had forgotten to mention that all along Jones has been jogging along in the company of the delightful idiot Partridge, who had been expelled from Allworthy's employ twenty years earlier because he was reputed to be Jones' natural father.

When Fielding opens up a fresh plot twist by saying, "the reader will remember that this was the lady who had departed the inn just a few minutes before Sophia in the ninth book of this history," or something similar, well -- you know you have taken too long to read the tale. You have forgotten too much. You want to have done well enough by the master to be able to chime right in with the character who, almost at the end, sees the villainy that has dogged Jones' and his lady's footsteps, exclaiming with her " 'I see all! I see all!' "

And what do we see? Even before getting bogged down in Upton, it should occur to us that one of the themes of the story is deception. Over and over again, Jones especially is the unwitting victim of someone else's simple lie, someone's theft, someone's silent complicity in an injustice, someone's unwitting obedience to a nefarious plot. And yet Fielding himself thinks the theme is something different (although he does allow that "any human mind may be imposed upon," and there is nothing to be done about it). Way down at the bottom of the deep well that is Tom Jones, at chapter 10 of Book XVIII, the theme screams out at even the most forgetful and sleepy-eyed reader. Squire Allworthy says, " 'Prudence is indeed the duty which we owe to ourselves, and if we will be so much our own enemies as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the world is deficient in discharging their duty to us, for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others will, I am afraid, be too apt to build upon it.' "

True, but it's hard to know in what sense Jones has been imprudent throughout the story. His worst deeds seem to be that he sleeps with a lot of women while in love with the pure Sophia, but Fielding is no prude to be horrified at that. Sophia, naturally, is horrified by it, but then she is the picture of eighteenth-century female imprudence herself. How many well-brought up gentry girls simply left their homes and cast themselves upon the world to avoid an odious marriage, in an era when there was nothing for a woman of a certain class to do to survive except marry? Although Tom Jones is a light-hearted book, Fielding does hint at the brutality of the world he chronicled, the world that Sophia and Tom suffer (briefly) in. There is the long, strange story of the Man of the Hill, for one thing, which seems to be Dickensian in its moral purpose. And later Sophia's own protectress in London tries to arrange for her to be raped by a lord who wants her, so that she'll be too soiled to marry anything but that.

On the back of my paperback edition of this book, Coleridge is quoted as saying that "upon his word, he thinks Tom Jones, the Alchemist, and Oedipus Tyrannus the three most perfect plots ever planned." (The Alchemist was a play by Ben Jonson, written in 1610.) He's probably right, but following the master, Fielding, through the convolutions of Tom Jones will require, for me, more than two readings. Perhaps it requires an eighteenth-century mind -- a mind able also to make conversation in full sentences, nay paragraphs, with other people. I know that he has made no mistakes. I know that he has thought everything out, and quite a time it must have taken. I'm just d----d if I can see it all yet. And oh by the way, we've forgotten to acknowledge the work and wit that went into the introductory chapters of every single "book" in the book, in which Fielding unburdened himself of various ideas, on love, on critics, "On the serious in writing, and for what purpose it is introduced." He says that if these introductory chapters are too dull, we may skip them.

And oh by the way -- Henry Fielding was a professional playwright, then "went back to school" as we would phrase it, studying law and serving as a justice of the peace in order to earn a living after the Licensing Act of 1737 closed down a good many theaters. While pursuing this second career, he opened his third, novel writing. Joseph Andrews and Amelia are also his. All that, before the eighteenth century's health hazards caught up with him, killing him at the age of 47.

The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I read The Confessions laboring under two handicaps, or compelling Rousseau to labor under them, which I suppose was not fair to him at all. To begin with, I approached it already having read Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals some years ago. Johnson began his study of the influence of secular, usually politically passionate and liberal modern intellectuals with Rousseau, in a chapter entitled "An Interesting Madman." And he generally eviscerates this Enlightenment sage as a veritable psychopath and a liar, responsible for endless future mischief and to be distrusted above all in, and because of, The Confessions.

And I read the book using a method that a professor of mine once said was absolutely vital for graduate school, when one has to "read" three books per week every week, each semester, for years. I am not in grad school nor do I ever intend to be, but the method sounded intriguing, considering how many great books there are waiting to be read in this world. So I read Rousseau's opening chapter, a middle chapter, and the closing chapter. And I flipped through parts of the rest. That part about reading a middle chapter always struck me as risky. Suppose you pick a middle chapter which happens not to be the vital one, especially in a huge book? I chose The Confessions' Book Seven, got a little bored, and moved to Book Eight, at the very start of which the author announces, "With this one starts the long chain of my misfortunes ...."


I did not get too far into the book before I began to agree with Johnson that this man probably was insane. He starts abruptly, with admissions of having been whipped in childhood and liking it, admissions salacious enough to make the reader sit up and think, good God, so he is going to tell the truth. (A short, eerie passage reveals that when his family realized he liked it, they quickly gave up that form of punishment.) And he admits that going to the opera as the guest of a friend, but then sneaking out of the theater, returning his ticket, and pocketing his friend's refund money, was "a disgraceful theft." But he leaves such titillations behind after the second book or so, and instead writes about his beautiful self, about his splendid behavior and the long parade of malicious wretches, originally so loved and so kind, who dragged him into the miseries and corruptions which he will explore in time.

He seems to be incapable of getting any distance from himself. Early on, he records that as a grown man in his thirties, he righteously snubbed an older woman with whom he fancied he had had a rocky affair as an eleven-year-old boy twenty years before. He wasn't joking. As for the disgraceful theft, he reasons that after all he hadn't made use of the money as it was intended, namely to see the opera; anyway, money is absurd. And over and over, he is the glorious soul who, for example, walked six miles in the heat, fainting with exhaustion, to visit the imprisoned Diderot; he is the noble creature who cannot have done wrong in abandoning his five children to the Foundling Home (where, Johnson says, he knew they would die), because -- he was Jean-Jacques. How could he, whose virtues and mind were perfect, do wrong? "No, I feel, and boldly declare -- it is impossible. Never for a moment in his life could Jean-Jacques have been a man without feelings or compassion, an unnatural father." He is the glorious, principled man who in later life refused a pension from some misliked aristocrat, in spite of Diderot's exhorting him to take it if only to support Therese -- the mother of his five children.

The whole point of Rousseau's life and thinking was the search for freedom from the moral constraints of law and society. At the beginning of Book Eight he describes learning of the topic for a literary competition sponsored by the Dijon Academy in 1749: "Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or to improve them?" "The moment I read this," he states, "I beheld another universe and became another man."

He seems to be implying that here for the first time he saw the possibility that morals can change and that they can come from fallible, changeable, human sources: the arts and sciences, for instance. And that therefore, a true, free man must guide himself gloriously without reference to them. It's hard for the reader to judge, though, whether here we have a great genius naturally developing his thoughts outward in great and new directions, or whether we have the grown-up version of the dreadful young boy who urinated in the neighbors' cooking pots, and is now thrilled to find a philosophical excuse for doing so all through adulthood. "[I strove] to uproot from my heart all tendencies to be affected by the judgment of men, and everything that might deflect me, out of fear of reproach, from conduct that was good and reasonable in itself." His essay for the Dijon Academy, by the way, won the prize.

Of course, what he never acknowledged was that in order to be the free spirit who denied foolish laws' and customs' hold over men, he trusted the rest of society to hold to those customs and be decent to him while he offended them. When he went for the first time bearded and shabbily clothed to the opera, as a moral statement of freedom, he trusted the rest of the house not to hiss him all the way home, or at least to the barber's. He was perhaps the first hippie. And, on that larger matter which did trouble his conscience permanently, no one ever entered his bedroom in the middle of the night and knocked him on the head for having abandoned five infants in succession to the Foundling Home, announcing "If I begin to pander to opinion over one matter, I shall pretty soon be doing so over everything" while swinging the stick.

In The Confessions we hear comparatively little of his philosophy spelled out. It is strange, when we do, to note the abrupt change in tone, perceptible even through a translation. The same change in tone occurs when he writes about writing. The misty, refulgent maniac vanishes, and a professional adult replaces him, asking hard questions about the origins of politics and how to improve his prose style. We do hear a great deal, especially toward the end, of friendships' blossoming and fading, and of the peregrinations necessary when ancien regime rulers sent out arrest warrants for him upon the publication of a new, freedom-filled book.

This most influential writer of the last two centuries, according to Paul Johnson, seems never to have been in real danger, but rather to have spent much of his life living in charming, secluded homes provided for him by well-fixed admirers, especially women, and writing. Ill-health dogged him, as it dogged everyone. The image of him dressed in his Armenian caftan -- more comfortable considering his medical problems -- and sitting making lace alongside the neighboring women is striking. Emile, The Social Contract, and the Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar all helped create aspects of the modern world that we take for granted, from seemingly minor things like comfortable clothes for children especially, to major assumptions, as that the beauties of nature and the innocence of primitive cultures have always been corrupted by (Western) civilization.

At the time, these thoughts were new. He traveled to Britain, home of liberty, for safety once and there met three great men -- Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and David Hume -- none of whom "thought much of him," according to the preface to this Penguin edition. Most interesting, that.

"Tagged"

I've been tagged! as bloggers say excitedly when this happens to them.

By sheer luck, Sucharita Sarkar at Why Not Blog It Out was good enough to invite me to play a blog tag game, involving literature, just when I am reading -- no joke -- Rousseau's Confessions. So for the purposes of the game, I can seem much more intellectual than I would if she had tagged me last weekend, when I took it into my head to borrow a couple of bodice-ripper romances from the local public library. Sweet Revenge, anybody? To be fair, one could argue that Rousseau is just as smutty as, and far more genuinely unclean than, the excellent and hard- working ladies who keep the romance industry locomotive on the tracks and roaring by at 90 miles per hour year after year.

The rules of this tag game are like so:
Pick up the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.
Tag five people with this game, and acknowledge the person who tagged you.

Herewith, Rousseau, p. 123:

He knew all the great performers, all the famous works, all the actors, all the actresses, all the pretty ladies, and all the great gentlemen. He seemed familiar with everything that was alluded to. But directly a subject was mentioned he interrupted the conversation with some broad joke, which made everyone laugh and forget what had been said.

Tame and straightforward, by the standards of the book. The "he" in the passage is one Venture de Villeneuve, an impoverished musician who knocked on Rousseau's door in Annecy one cold February night in the early 1730s and, in time, led him on to "fresh follies" after he had been behaving himself for a year.

I must admit that page 123 is farther along in the book than I have actually reached, so I am not sure what happens next or even what follies came before. The Confessions is a difficult book to come at, for me, because years ago I read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, whose first chapter savages Rousseau as a liar and a psychopath loathed and pitied, in the end, by most of the people who had ever known him. This is not to speak of what Johnson, and other conservative thinkers, regard as his wholly pernicious influence on the modern West.

We'll see if I am able to come to independent conclusions. So far, the anecdotes are not auguring well for the author, who smiles out at us so happily, or so creepily, from Maurice-Quentin de la Tour's sketch on the cover of the Penguin paperback edition. Here was a man who, in his thirties, snubbed an older woman with whom he fancied he had had a lover's quarrel as an eleven-year-old boy. Here also was a man who attended the opera as the guest of a friend, but then, when he saw how crowded the theater was, turned back to the ticket booth, handed in his ticket, pocketed his friend's refund money, and left. This is not to speak of Himself as that eleven year old boy, sneaking into a neighbor's kitchen and urinating in her cooking pot.

Anyway, thanks to Sucharita for tagging me. To finish playing my turn of the game, I have tagged:
Ann
Dr. Debs
Farmgirl Susan
Tom
Derrick

Happy reading to all, and I will continue my journey through Rousseau's "enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator."