Romanic Review: PLAYING WITH CHANCE: ROUSSEAU'S ILLUMINATION

Gambling obsessed all levels of French society during the Enlightenment. Louis XIV held appartements du roi given over to gambling three times a week at Versailles, the queen hosted a nightly game, and courtiers scheduled additional occasions for play. Hosts so frequently acted as bankers for games to entertain their guests that satirists, chroniclers, and moralists complained that compulsive gambling had destroyed other forms of social entertainment.1 In Paris ten authorized maisons de jeux operated games involving some degree of skill (jeux de commerce] but essentially they served as fronts for more lucrative chance-driven games (jeux de hasard). Gambling also took place at the two great Paris fairs during almost four months of the year, all year long at foreign embassies, and eventually at gambling houses at the Hôtel de Gesvres and later at the Hôtel de Soissons. In addition to these legal venues, the large number of clandestine Parisian gaming rooms, lighted by tripots, made one visitor comment that "flaming pots set Paris ablaze," and gambling was by no means restricted to Paris.2 The "Age des Lumières" was lighted by gambling.

Although official prohibitions referred to both religious and sociological dangers from gambling, within the context of the period, risking large sums at play became an analogy for risking one's life in battle. Having the courage to risk and winning or losing with equal equanimity demonstrated indifference to material gain and thus served as a means of displaying hereditary status. When the marquis de Dangeau (?-1720), a recently ennobled Huguenot, won several fortunes at court through his skillful play, he was not accused of cheating but of applying his vaunted study of probabilities in the service of venal gain. Dangeau's consistent success not only signaled the end of the aristocratic posture of superiority to money, it affirmed the primacy of mathematical probability and sanctified bourgeois economic expertise.3 Areas of life that previously appeared to escape deterministic laws had been tamed by mathematical analysis. Thus, those skilled in the science of probability could master events that previously seemed to lie beyond conscious direction.

This culture of gambling presided over a paradigmatic shift in consciousness that took place during the eighteenth century. Narratives of risk and reward appearing in periodicals and novels featured happy or unhappy outcomes of accidental events. All types of accidental experience began to accrue significance as elements that could form the course of a life. Their increasing importance seemed to require interpretation, and how an individual reacted to an experience appeared to determine the eventual outcome. Thus, awareness of the potentially determinant role of chance or accident was accompanied by a sense that the self could be defined by the way the individual responded to such events.

As the "most accident-prone figure in the Enlightenment," Jean-Jacques Rousseau serves as an exemplary representative of this new aspect of selfdefinition.4 His autobiographical writings record his perception that what makes him unique is the sensibility he displays in his response to random events and the power of his imagination to transform them. What is at stake at this transitional moment is a complex interrelation between latent influences from classical tradition, in which the self was defined in terms of immutable rather than accidental qualities, and the fascination with contingency that characterized the shifting social parameters of Enlightenment France. We see these two factors intersect in the life-altering accident Rousseau experienced in the summer of 1749.

He was walking along the road from Paris to Vincennes when he read in his newspaper the notice of a competition for the best response to a question posed by the Academy of Dijon. At that moment of chance reading he experienced an epiphany that has come to be known as his "illumination on the road to Vincennes":

Suddenly a fortunate chance happened to enlighten me about what I had to do for myself, and to think about my fellows about whom my heart was ceaselessly in contradiction with my mind, and whom I still felt myself brought to love along with so many reasons to hate them.5

The exact words Rousseau used to describe the occasion are heureux hasard. While in English usage the word hazard generally signifies a risk or peril, especially one that will produce bodily harm, the French term hasard is less restrictive and denotes chance.6 The etymology of hasard emphasizes the secular implications of the word, which probably derives from the Arab plural az-zahr, meaning dice. Another origin dates from the time of the Crusaders, who played a game of dice named after their place of encampment, the castle Hasart. Both definitions show the origin of the term in a game of dice-hence the generic name for gambling, jeux de hasard. However, something of the original Latin word for chance (sors) also hovers over the word in relation to Rousseau's illumination. Sors derived from the Roman word for the tokens used in casting lots for government jobs, so that by association chance was linked to events that determined one's "lot in life." Reading the question posed for the Academy's competition was a "happy chance" in the sense that it gave him ideas that would win the prize and define his future career.

The experience was at once intellectual and deeply personal. We know Rousseau often wandered in the countryside for pleasure, either alone or with a beloved companion like Mme. Houdetot, but on the day of his illumination, he was on his way to visit his friend and fellow thinker Denis Diderot.7 Diderot, whose Philosophical Thoughts had been condemned by the censor shortly after its publication in 1746, was under arrest in the Château of Vincennes for having written Letter on the Blind, which employed the wellestablished philosophical problem of the nature of sight as a metaphor for his radical critique of Enlightenment reason. His confinement was emblematic of state control over the French press, which attempted to censor all works opposed to the monarchy, the church, or morality.8 Because Rousseau's own efforts to make a name for himself, such as his project for a new musical notation, an opera, and his play Narcissus, had failed to materialize, his sympathy for his friend's situation must have been colored by the fact that someone from a similar artisan background had managed to achieve distinction, indeed notoriety, in the literary field.

In the Confessions, Rousseau rehearsed the circumstances surrounding his illumination:

That year 1749 the Summer was excessively hot. From Paris to Vincennes adds up to two leagues. Hardly in a condition to pay for cabs, at two o'clock in the afternoon I went on foot when I was alone, and I went quickly so as to arrive earlier. The trees on the road, always pruned in the fashion of the country, gave almost no shade, and often exhausted from the heat and fatigue, I spread out on the ground when I was not able to go any farther. I took it into my head to take some book along to moderate my pace. One day I took the Mercury of France and while walking and glancing over it I fell upon this question proposed by the Academy of Dijon for the prize for the following year: Has the progress of the sciences and arts tended to corrupt or purify morals?

At the moment of that reading I saw another universe and became another man. (294)

Rousseau gives us a specific moment in time. He speaks of his restricted finances, the lopped branches of the trees, the heat of the road. Deftly and economically, he creates an empirical setting that highlights the shock of his chance reading and presents a thoroughly modern tableau. Yet by using reading to slow his pace and block the sensations of the roadway and the heat of the sun from his mind, he creates a world of reading that exists alongside the empirical world that he has sketched. Thus, this passage links the world of reading with the world of experience.

Crowds of lively ideas rushed into Rousseau's mind when he read the question posed by the Academy. He suddenly envisioned a universe shining with truths that seemed to him as immutable as the stars. A chance reading, an encounter that took place in a public place with information available to anyone who had access to a popular newspaper, created a unique and intensely private experience. This illumination, he later says, constituted all of his thought, and the experience became a touchstone, a foundation for his autobiographical attempts. He obsessively rewrote his life around this moment, chronicling both his physical and mental sensations, as if he could never quite grasp what had happened to him on the road to Vincennes.

Rousseau described his experience in the Confessions (1766-70), the "Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont" (1763), the Dialogues (1772-76), and the Reveries of the Solitary "Walker (1776-78), but most extensively in his "second Letter to Malesherbes" (1762). "Je tombe sur la question," he wrote in his letter, "I fell across the question" and then recounts how he enacted this idiomatic expression by falling to the ground:

If anything has ever resembled a sudden inspiration, it is the motion that was caused in me by that reading; suddenly I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights; crowds of lively ideas presented themselves at the same time with a strength and a confusion that threw me into an inexpressible perturbation; I feel my head seized by a dizziness similar to drunkenness. A violent palpitation oppresses me, makes me sick to my stomach; not being able to breathe anymore while walking, I let myself fall under one of the trees of the avenue, and I pass a half-hour there in such agitation that when I got up again I noticed the whole front of my coat soaked with my tears without having felt that I shed them.9

While his spirit rises, "dazzled by a thousand lights," his body falls, oppressed and panting. The scene invokes a division of spirit and body. It is "real" in the sense that it is grounded in the detail of the moment, but beneath these circumstantial details lie old narratives.

Rousseau's illumination echoes two of the most famous conversion narratives in Western thought: Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus and Augustine's conversion through a chance reading narrated in his Confessions. When the light of God shines down on Paul, blinding him and knocking him from his horse, it directly manifests God's presence. When Augustine overhears a voice that he interprets as a direction to read and opens Paul's Epistle to the Romans, his conversion signifies a mediation of God's power through reading the holy words. Rousseau, however, received his illumination when his glance fell on a newspaper

Continued from page 2.

The taste for gambling is the fruit of avarice and boredom, and it takes hold only in an empty mind and heart; it seems to me that I would have enough sentiment and knowledge to do without such a supplement. One rarely sees thinkers enjoying themselves much in gambling, which interrupts the habit of thinking or turns it to arid combinations of elements. Thus one of the good things, and perhaps the only one, which the taste for the sciences has produced is to deaden this sordid passion a bit; people would rather exert themselves to prove the utility of gambling than to indulge in it. (IV.348)

Scientific understanding was less reprehensible than avarice or an empty mind or heart, yet Rousseau assigned it a degree of tepid praise that accorded with his view that the arts and sciences had a negative impact on society.

The question posed by the Academy of Dijon invoked the notion of progress so important to Enlightenment rationalism. From the great crowd of ideas that visited Rousseau at the moment of his illumination, his reflections led him to a conclusion that incorporated a subtle paradox: man is naturally good but the social institutions that civilize him make him evil. Rousseau's fall stopped his progress along the road and his palpitations and tears were spontaneous effusions. Thus his fall acted out, theatrically, his rejection of civilization in favor of a return to natural purity.15 His sudden recognition of the goodness of "natural man" found expression in his elaboration of man's mythical prehistory. But the process that transformed Rousseau into "another man" whose writing would assure his lasting fame also pulled him toward the vision of a new form of being-a radically modern individual born out of accidental experience.16

The only piece Rousseau wrote directly under the force of his illumination, the prosopopoeia of Fabricius, involved the assumption of a new voice and character.17 The word prosopopoeia-which derives from the Greek for "face (prósopon)" and "making (poieîn]"-is a rhetorical figure that was studied in the classical curriculum in which the student adopts the persona of an earlier writer to declaim in his voice. In other words, in this moment he creates or is occupied by a literary character. We see a similar process of character development at work in the contemporary English novel. For example, when Joseph Addison invented the character of Bickerstaff as the author of his Spectator papers or Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoe on the actual shipwreck experience of Alexander Selkirk, the multiplication of the authorial persona introduced the possibility of creating a deepened (multi-faceted) self for the author and a heightened expectation of comparable depth or complexity in fictional characterization.

Rousseau chose the persona of a Roman whose poverty signaled his virtue to inveigh against "vain talents":18

What has become of the thatch roofs and the rustic hearths where moderation and virtue used to dwell? What fatal splendor has replaced Roman simplicity? What is this alien speech? What are these effeminate morals? What is the meaning of these statues, these paintings, these buildings?... Romans, hasten to overturn these Amphitheaters; smash these marbles; burn these paintings; drive out these slaves who subjugate you, and whose fatal arts corrupt you. Let other hands acquire fame for vain talents; the only talent worthy of Rome is that of conquering the world and making virtue reign in it.19

Rousseau asserted that the corrupting influence of civilization was not confined to Rome or to eighteenth-century France but was part of the universal history of mankind. "What did I have this great man say," he explained, "that I could not have put into the mouth of Louis XII or Henry IV?" (14). Yet even as Rousseau spoke through Fabricius, a creator or fabricator contemptuous of unworthy talents, Fabricius invokes the departed Cineas, the ambassador of Pyrrhus, who admired the Roman senate for its virtue. In other words, Rousseau not only attached himself to the moral authority of great men but by adopting a series of literary personae, he also expressed a fundamental uncertainty about who was truly speaking or writing. "Putting on of a face" leads only to another mask, another prosopopoeia, so that the self is endlessly dislocated backwards in a process of cultural archaeology until he uncovers the archetypal figure of Natural Man. Thus, just as we can see a deepening sense of self emerging from the transformation of conversation into character in the developing English novel, Rousseau makes a classical rhetorical technique signify in a new and unsettling way, and what initially appears as a rhetorical exercise becomes an exercise in self-creation.

Before his illumination, Rousseau's thoughts had turned incessantly upon his relation to his fellow men. When he described his experience in the "second Letter to Malesherbes," he referred to his fellow men as "mes semblables," literally "those like me" (575). However, the term semblable contains a cultural memory of an Aristotelian and neo-Scholastic notion of categories based upon formal similarity. For Aristotle, as for the Scholastics, an individual differed from his "semblable" only because each man was composed of an individual unit of the same matter. But the notion of being like other men tormented Rousseau.

He asserted his uniqueness when he wrote in the Confessions that his illumination had transformed him into an "autre homme."20 In this context, his use of autre reminds us of his use of "au moins je suis autre" at the beginning of that work:

Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any of the ones I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. If I am worth no more, at least I am different (autre). Whether nature has done well or ill in breaking the mould in which it cast me, is something which cannot be judged until I have been read. (1.5)

Understood in the neo-Scholastic sense, the mold represents the infinitely reproducible semblables. Through his narrative of the illumination, Rousseau mythologized the violence of breaking this mold as the liberation of self through the experience of accident. Thus, accidents or chance events function as sites around which narratives of individual difference can collocate. For Rousseau the pedagogical function of these scenes became a point at which to distinguish his unique responses from those of the average man. Descriptions of accidents fill his autobiographical writings to demonstrate this difference and he returns obsessively to moments of chance rupture that serve as touchstones for self-understanding.

During the half an hour of inexpressible physical distress that Rousseau experienced after reading the notice in the newspaper, he panted for breath, his heart palpitated, and he cried without having realized that he had done so. Separated from his spirit, his body assumed agency, acting in ways he recognized only after he returned to himself. It was imbued with a unique responsive force that took him by surprise and seemed to demand analysis and interpretation. Upon reflection, he understood his physical signs as testaments to the sincerity of his illumination, but he also came to believe that such spontaneous physical responses represented the innate expressions of Natural Man.

We can recognize the power of the body and the frankness of Rousseau's Confessions in the famous "spanking scene" at the beginning of his autobiography. He remembers a beating he received as a boy from Mile. Lambercier, but the nature of his reaction comes as a surprise: "and what is most bizarre in this is that this punishment increased my affection even more for the one that had inflicted it on me." He recognized "doubtless some precocious sexual instinct was mixed in this" (13) and adds:

Who would believe that this childhood punishment received at eight years of age from the hand of a woman of thirty, determined my tastes, my desires, my passions, my self for the rest of my life, and this, precisely in the opposite sense, to the one that ought to follow naturally? At the same time that my senses were inflamed, my desires were so well put off the track, that-being limited to what I had experienced-they did not venture to look for anything else. (1.13-14)

When Rousseau was spanked, his body responded with an erection. This sexual response constitutes a post-ontological relation between body and soul that demonstrates how events that could not have been recognized as determining individuality within a neo-Aristotelian schema (and would be disowned by the new statistically "normal" man) accrued significance within his understanding of the self.21 Later Freud would call such a response a perversion; Rousseau describes it as a false turn, literally a turning away. Such responses acquired significance by marking him as unique, and that was why he included them in his autobiographical writings.

The importance of autobiography in Rousseau's work allows us to recognize the extent to which he understood himself through the act of writing. While the book as a figure for the self is an old trope, he adopted it to protect as well as to explore his sense of individuality. He told Malesherbes that he could remember only a quarter of the lively ideas that came to him at the moment of his illumination. The sole artifact that survived unscathed and unchanged was the prosopopoeia of Fabricius, which Rousseau wrote without remembering that he had done so. His struggle to recapture the ideas that initially crowded into his mind suggests that writing provided a protection against loss: both his memory and his authorial identity were at stake.

In the Confessions, Rousseau described how he entrusted the experience of his illumination to writing:

Although I have a lively remembrance of the impression I received from it, its details have escaped me since I set them down in one of my four letters to M. de Malesherbes. This is one of the peculiarities of my memory that deserves to be told. If it serves me, it does so only as long as I have relied on it, as soon as I entrust the deposit to paper it abandons me, and as soon as I have written a thing one time, I no longer remember it at all. (VIII.294)

At the same time that he trusts writing to guarantee the survival of his experiences, he alludes to Socrates' complaint in Plato's Phaedrus that writing leads to a loss of memory. In other words, transcribing his experiences represented a loss of personal self within the act of self-creation.

The body of texts Rousseau created alongside his physical body was intended to protect and conserve his ideas from change, but as he increasingly recognized, they were vulnerable to attack. He had reason to fear for his physical safety, for in 1762 both the Social Contract and Emile were condemned and burnt in Geneva as well as in France. To escape arrest, he fled to Neuchâtel and later to England but returned in 1767 to live in Paris under an assumed name. During these final years, he completed his Confessions, wrote Dialogues: Rousseau judge of Jean-Jacques, and began the unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Nevertheless, his assertion that all of his former friends, strangers on the street, and even children were part of an elaborate plot against him testifies to the paranoia that marked his later work.

Rousseau's sense of his difference from his fellow men and his identification with what he had written engendered the added fear that his textual self might be altered in ways beyond his control. Convinced that a plot to accomplish this was already in progress, he wrote:

In the Autumn of 1768, having resolved to return to England, I examined the papers that I had left with the intention of burning the greater number of them as a useless hindrance that I was dragging with me. I was starting that operation with the present collection, but leafing through it mechanically, my eye chanced to fall on a lacuna [je tombai par hasard sur une lacune] that had hardly struck me until then, but at that moment other circumstances reminded me of its importance and [the identity of] those responsible gave me the first idea of the hideous plot of which I am the victim.22

He fell by hazard on a lacune that he interpreted as a plot to steal an important passage in his text. By extension, the plots of those who would rob him of his ideas-whether to alter or destroy them or to use his words as their own-could wound his textual body. Indeed, the public reaction to his prizewinning First Discourse that inaugurated his new authorial identity had destroyed his earlier self, yet past experience had taught him that the impact of public opinion was not always benign.23 Now, in the Dialogues written during the final years of his life, he returned to the rhetorical device of the prosopopoeia, dividing his authorial persona into a character called Rousseau and one called the Frenchman who meet to discuss the writings of an author named Jean-Jacques. "Rousseau" admires the work of "Jean-Jacques," but public opinion has deterred the Frenchman from even reading it. Not until "Rousseau" actually meets "Jean-Jacques," and discovers someone radically different from the man described by his reputation, and the Frenchman reads the texts for himself can they begin to reconcile the man with his published work.24 What is at stake in this exchange is interpretive vulnerability, and the Dialogues propose to teach the reader how to respond as justly as "Rousseau" and the Frenchman learn to do:

And that is also all he himself [Jean-Jacques] desires. The hope that his memory be restored someday to the honor it deserves, and that his books become useful through the esteem owed to their Author is henceforth the only hope that can please him in this world. Add to that the sweetness of seeing two decent and true hearts once again open themselves to his own. Let's temper in this way the horror of that solitude in which he is forced to live in the midst of the human race. (III.245)

The old division between body and spirit returns in the Dialogues as a nostalgic division between physical and textual bodies, yet unlike the immaterial and immutable spirit, Rousseau's textual body proves as vulnerable as he feared. The "History of the Preceding Writing" that he appended to the Dialogues affirms the validity of this comparison of text to spirit, for rather than submitting his manuscript to a publisher, he attempted to hand it over to providence by placing the pages on the altar of Notre Dame. Contrary to all expectation, he found the gate to the altar locked and experienced a moment of dizziness and "an upheaval of my whole being such that I cannot recall suffering anything like it" (248).

In Rousseau's last autobiographical work, the Reveries, the culture of gambling is embedded in his method of polishing into a series of written "Promenades" the notes he sketched on the backs of playing cards during his walks.25 In the first promenade, he promises to write down his ideas as they come into his head, without regard for logic or connection. Indeed, this random technique seems designed to counter any formal restraints of plot or genre, a rhetoric of spontaneity intended to ensure the essential purity of his revelations.26 His strategy was to describe the accidental associations that came to him as he walked through the country lanes outside Paris:

Having, then, formed the project of describing the habitual state of my soul in the strangest position in which a mortal could ever find himself, I saw no simpler and surer way to carry out this enterprise than to keep a faithful record of my solitary walks and of the reveries which fill them when I leave my head entirely free and let my ideas follow their bent without resistance or constraint.27

As Rousseau walked across the country, his ideas traveled the space of his imagination, and the sights he encountered sparked, as if by chance, memories and associations with past events. It is as if, in composing his thoughts on the playing cards, he was engaged in a game of hasard, where hasard entered into the very structure of the book.28

What interested him most were flowers. Looking at flowers allowed Rousseau to think of himself in relation to Linneaus's system of botanical categorization in which the Aristotelian qualities survive in a classification of plants according to genus, family, and species. Rousseau was attracted to the rarest of flowers, and in the "second Promenade," he described how three specimens caught his attention on a walk through the pastoral fields on the way to Charonne. He took special pleasure in the Cerastium aquaticum, which he pressed into the book he was carrying (1 O). Immediately after this moment of "self-preservation," Rousseau experienced an accident that recalled his illumination on the road to Vincennes. As he passed in front of the inn known as the Jolly Gardener, a dog and coach careened toward him out of nowhere. The crowd parted for the dog, but Rousseau attempted to jump over him:

I judged that the only means I had to avoid being knocked to the ground was to make a great leap, so well-timed that the dog would pass under me while I was still in the air. This idea, quicker than a flash, and which I had the time neither to think through nor carry out, was the last before my accident. (11)

He did not register the incongruity of being knocked down by a dog or the bizarre aspect of his response although these qualities are evident to the reader. An accident cannot be perceived as comical unless the victim can be detached from potential harm, either through physical invulnerability, by dehumanization, or with irony. Rousseau could not appreciate the humor of his accidents because he was never detached from his introspection.

Before he could jump, the dog knocked him down, and he fell headfirst in the path of the carriage. He barely escaped death and regained consciousness hours later in the arms of strangers.

They asked me where I lived; it was impossible for me to say. I asked where I was; they told me: "at the Haute-Bourne." They might just as well have said: "On Mount Atlas." In succession, I had to ask what country I found myself in, what city, and what district. Even that was not enough for me to know where I was. It took me the whole distance from there to the boulevard to recall my address and my name. (12)

Rousseau's accident represents an ambitious and conscious rewriting of an accident Montaigne described in his essay "On Practice."29 After Montaigne was thrown from his horse when a larger man and mount collided with him, he did not know where he was, but loss of memory becomes for Rousseau the loss of self-knowledge, of who he is. As with his earlier illumination, he returned again and again to the ecstasy produced by this second moment of separation from his physical body. "I felt a rapturous calm in my whole being," he wrote, "and each time I remember it, I find nothing comparable to it in all the activity of known pleasures" (12).

Part of the calm Rousseau felt was linked to the physical shock of his fall. Only when his wife saw him did he realize he was injured. However, the accident temporarily calmed his paranoia as well. If the paranoid imagines that everyone he meets is involved in a nebulous pattern of malign intentions, in his accident scene the harm was literal and the direct cause perceptible. The shock of the accident replaced the hypothetical expectation. Although the harm Rousseau anticipated had been suddenly and unexpectedly realized, the experience brought with it a calming solidity of cause and effect. Because paranoia and the interpretation of an actual accident cannot coexist, his experience on the road to Charonne represented a self-defining moment of inner stability.

As soon as Rousseau left the sphere of the accident, however, his paranoia returned. He interpreted his visitors, such as the secretary of M. Lenoir, the Chief of Police, or Mme. d'Ormoy, whom he suspected of trying to make use of his authorial persona, as participants in a plot against him. And when he read a report of his accident in the newspaper, he was astounded to learn of his own death:

I had already gone out several times and even strolled in the Tuileries quite a few times when I saw by the astonishment of those who met me, that there was still another bit of news concerning me of which I was ignorant. I finally learned that it was rumored that I had died from my fall; and this rumor spread so rapidly and so obstinately that, more than two weeks after I became aware of it, the King himself and the Queen spoke of it as of something certain. In announcing this happy bit of news the Avignon Courier, according to what someone had the concern to write me, did not fail on this occasion to give a preview of the tribute of outrages and indignities which are being prepared in the form of a funeral oration in memory of me after my death. (14)

This announcement confirmed his paranoia. His career as an author had begun in a chance reading of the Mercury of France; the Avignon Courier reported his death. Finally, he chanced to learn that a subscription had been opened to print any manuscripts found in his apartment, and this proved to him that his enemies had "a collection of fabricated writings available just for the purpose of attributing them to me right after my death."

I wore myself out making a thousand commentaries on it all and trying to understand the mysteries they rendered inexplicable for me. The only constant result of so many enigmas was to confirm all of my previous conclusions, to wit, that my personal fate and that of my reputation have been so fastened by the connivance of the whole present generation that no effort on my part could shield me, since it is completely impossible for me to transmit any bequest to other ages without making it pass in this age through the hands of those interested in suppressing it. (15)

Between the illumination on the road to Vincennes, which offered a solution to the tension between Rousseau's individuality and the pressures of social determination, and the accident on the road near Charonne, which allowed a remission of his paranoia, we see him taking pleasure in the experience of accident as a mode of self-realization. But he also expressed an underlying instability indicative of the gradual disillusionment with the promises of deterministic reasoning. As a young man, he had adopted the confident posture implicit in a mastery of the laws of probability and gambled his future on a chance opportunity. Now he envisioned his life as a stacked game in which he no longer controlled the odds:

I saw that with respect to me reason was banished from every head and equity from every heart. 1 saw a frenetic generation completely cede to the blind fury of its leaders against an unfortunate man who never did, willed, or rendered evil to anybody. After having sought ten years for a man in vain, I finally had to extinguish my lantern and cry out: "There are no more!" Then I began to see myself alone on earth and I understood that in relation to me my contemporaries were nothing more than automatons who acted only on impulse and whose actions I could calculate only from the laws of motion. (72)

Radically alone, Rousseau has grown more cynical than Diogenes and no longer believes in the existence of an honest man. No one possesses inner integrity or transparency of heart comparable to his own. His fellow men are merely automata, whose spirits are subject to the external laws of the plot just as matter is subject to the laws of motion.

Rousseau's invocation of automata also echoes the separation of the modes of the mind from those of the body that Descartes discussed in his Discourse on Method. Descartes assigned numerous functions to the body that had been considered mental properties, for on a physiological level, he could comprehend even the faculties of perception and memory as operating through the types of cogs and levers, hydraulic pumps, and whirlpools available within the world of seventeenth-century mechanics. As a result, he realized that if he looked out of his window, he could not distinguish men walking down the street from automata. However, just as Rousseau conceived a moral objection to the notion that chance governed creative talent, Descartes believed it was a "moral impossibility" that a machine could have enough flexibility to act in every situation as reason enabled men to act. Therefore, only a human being could possess the power of speech.30 This distinction was perpetuated into the eighteenth century, for the elaborate automata capable of writing, drawing, and playing music that dazzled the public remained mute.

Rousseau's life-long attempt to explore the connection between reason and feeling ended with the realization that he possessed a unique blend of these qualities. Other men might act on the basis of instincts and show themselves in possession of elaborate mechanical functions. Nevertheless, they lacked his capacity to respond to life experiences or to articulate those responses as he did. Like automata, they remained mute.

The notion that speech distinguishes a man from an automaton accrues special significance within the context of the transformation from conversation to authorial narrative that transpired with the explosion of print culture. Just as Rousseau conceived of his identity in terms of writing and multiplied it by assuming the personae of authorship, he communicates a radical shift in the nature of reading. The social pleasure of conversation (or of reading aloud in a group of "semblables") was evolving into the pleasure of reading alone, a change of circumstance that affected the relationship between reader and author. Increasingly, reading served as a vehicle for communion between isolated individuals. In the Reveries Rousseau alludes to this shifting context, "My enterprise is the same as Montaigne's, but my goal is the complete opposite of his: he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself" (8). Publication allowed the reader privileged access to this intimate process. By expressing a wish that "decent and true hearts once again open themselves to his own," Rousseau suggests that an act of reading-like his own chance reading on the road to Vincennes-may transform and illuminate the reader.

Rousseau staked his existence on a complex narrative of risk and reward, expectation and confirmation, serendipity and desire. Born into a society enflamed by gambling, he structured his literary enterprise around the manipulation of contingency as a vehicle for self-actualization, risking his deepest emotions at the gaming table of public opinion. And like Dangeau, who transformed hereditary aristocratic values through his mastery of the laws of probability, when Rousseau deployed his skill as a writer to alter his social position, he exposed himself to hostile criticism. Nevertheless, the level of introspection involved in his autobiographical writing shifted the terms of contemporary philosophical discourse. It altered the game. Within the pulse between determinism and contingency emblematic of the decades that precede the French Revolution, it is Rousseau who captures the ungrounded isolation of the individual on the cusp of a major shift in perception.

Barnard College

1. In Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) 30-32, Thomas Kavanagh provides a more detailed history of the gambling craze from 1674 into the reign of Louis XVI. This seminal study positions contingency as a force operating within the conventional characterization of Enlightenment reason and determinism.

2. Earlier works on gambling include Pierre Rémond de Montmort, Essai d'analyse sur les jeux de hasard (1708); Jean Dusaulx, De la Passion du jeu, depuis les temps anciens (1779); Abraham de Moivre, The Doctrine of Chances: Or, a Method of Calculating the Probabilities of Events in Play (London, 3rd edition, 1756; reprinted New York: Chelsea Publications, 1967). Later works include: Olivier Grussi, La Vie quotidienne des joueurs sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris: Hachette, [1985]); F. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling: The Origins and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era (New York: Hafner, 1962); D. M. Downes, Gambling, Work and Leisure: A Study across Three Areas (London: Routledge, 1976); Gerd Gigerenzer, Lorraine Daston, et al., The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989).

3. Kavanagh, 53-55.

4. This description originated with David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1988) 1.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Letters to Malesherbes," in The Confessions, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, eds. Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, transi. Christopher Kelly (Hanover and London: UP New England, 1995) vol. 5, 575. All future citations to Rousseau's work are taken from this edition.

6. The term hasard has a long and complex history, especially in seventeenth-century France, but undergoes a crucial reworking in Rousseau's writing. For more on the etymological origins of hasard, see Clément Rosset, Logique du pire: Éléments pour une philosophie tragique (Paris: Presses universitaires des France, 1971) 9-10.

7. For a discussion of Rousseau as the emblematic walker see Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) chapter 1.

8. Daniel Roche, "Censorship and the Publishing Industry," Revolution in Print: The Press in France 1775-1800, ed. Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (Berkeley: U California P, 1989) 3-26. According to Roche, 513 prisoners placed in the Bastille between 1740-49 (19% of the total) were under arrest for breaking the book laws. The percentage rose to 40% between 1750-59.

9. "Letters to Malesherbes," in Collected Works vol. 5, 575.

10. Raymond Birn, "Malesherbes and the Call for a Free Press," Revolution in Print, 50-66. A dramatic expansion of the French publishing industry took place beginning ca. 1750. Salons, public libraries, and reading rooms became social centers and although prices for membership in book-lending societies were high, the renting of books became commonplace. Reading habits also appeared to change, evolving from concentrated attention on a few accessible texts to a passion for acquiring and reading larger quantities of books. According to Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1994), 139 periodicals had more than a three-year run during the period from 1740-88, enough to require a special category within the censor's office. Based on a study of prospectuses for these periodicals, Censer suggests that readers were drawn primarily from the elite class (both commoners and nobles) and approximately 15-20% were women.

11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres à M. d'Alembert, ed. M. Fuchs. (Lille: Giard, Genève: Droz, 1948) 99. The translation is by David F. Bell, Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1993).

12. Ian Hacking discusses the shift from deterministic models of scientific understanding and the invention of probability theory. see his The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). see also The Probabilistic Revolution, ed. Lorenz Krüger et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). For a discussion of contingency in Diderot's work see Kavanagh, 162-184, Lester G. Crocker, Diderot's Chaotic Order: Approach to Synthesis (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), and Geoffrey Bremner, Order and Chance: The Pattern of Diderot's Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983). A more general consideration of these issues that focuses on the nineteenth-century French novel can be found in David F. Bell, Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text.

13. "Letter to Voltaire," in Collected Works, vol. 3 (August 18, 1756) 117-18.

14. The article on chance in Diderot's Encyclopédie supported a theological interpretation: "Chance (le hasard) is nothing. It is a fiction, a chimera bereft of possibility and existence. People attribute to chance effects whose causes they do not understand. But for God, knowing all causes and all effects, actual as well as potential, in the clearest detail, nothing can be an effect of chance." (my translation) Diderot's Encyclopédie, vol. 14 (Paris: Gamier, 1876) 84-85. Diderot's agnosticism refused to subordinate the representation of human knowledge to the workings of any theological principle, so this entry suggests that his imprisonment had given him a greater respect for the power of censorship. Overall, however, the Encyclopédie reflected his faith in human potential to advance (however chaotically) along the pathways of discovery, and his later writings testified to his own refusal to accept contemporary doctrines of probability. see Kavanagh, 246ff.

15. Other discussions of Rousseau's relation to the theatre include Amal Banerjee, "Rousseau's Concept of Theatre," British Journal of Aesthetics 17(1977) 171-77 and Benjamin R. Barber, "Rousseau and the Paradoxes of the Dramatic Imagination," Daedalus 107:3 (Summer, 1978) 79-92.

16. For an overview of the semantic history of the word "individual," see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1983) 161-165. For one recent attempt to pinpoint the first recognizably modern use of word "individual," see Edward W. Tayler, "The First Individual," Soundings of Things Done: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of S. K. Heninger, Jr., eds. Peter E. Medine and Joseph Wittreich (Newark: U Delaware P, 1997) 251-59.

17. He included this piece at the end of the first part of his First Discourse, published in January 1751.

18. Given Rousseau's financial state at the time (he walked to Vincennes because he could not afford a fiacre), we can understand his attraction to this figure, for in the Aeneid, Fabricius is briefly described as "parvo potentem: powerful in poverty"(VI.843). see Virgil, Aeneid, transi. H. Rushton Fairclough. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1940-46). Fabricius also is present in Dante's Purgatorio, where he appears just before the completion of Dante's penance and is greeted as "O buon Fabrizio, / con povertà volesti anzi virtute / ehe gran riccezza posséder con vizio." ("O good Fabricius, thou chosest for thy possessions virtue with poverty rather than great riches with wickedness.") Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, transi. John D. Sinclair (London: Bodley Head, 1939), reprinted (New York: Bantam Classic, 1982) XX.25-27.

19. First Discourse, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and transi. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997) 13.