Reveries of the Solitary Walker

Knocked down at Ménilmontant, 24 October 1776

On Thursday 24 October 1776, after his midday meal, Rousseau followed the boulevards to the rue du Chemin-Vert and climbed to the heights of Ménilmontant, then a village outside Paris. He crossed vineyards and meadows to Charonne, looking for plants. He found two he rarely saw around Paris, and a third, rarer still, that he later identified in a book he had with him and added to his collection of dried plants.

Around six in the evening he was coming down the hill at Ménilmontant when the people ahead of him scattered. A Great Dane, a big dog running in front of a carriage, was charging straight at him. He decided to jump so the dog would pass underneath, and he remembers nothing after that idea. The dog hit his legs, he fell face first onto the rough paving stones, and the coachman stopped the horses just in time.

He came round at nightfall in the arms of three or four young men. He saw the sky, a few stars and some greenery, and felt a calm that he says no pleasure he had known could match. He did not know who or where he was. He watched his own blood run like a stream without feeling that it was his. Only on the way back to the boulevard did he remember his name and address.

A stranger told him to take a cab from the Temple. He walked instead, half a league to the rue Plâtrière, and climbed his stairs in the dark. Thérèse Levasseur, by then his wife, screamed when she saw him. His upper lip was split to the nose and four teeth were pushed in, but nothing was broken. Soon a rumour went round Paris that the fall had killed him, and a newspaper, the Courrier d'Avignon, announced his death.

Paris on foot

The walks go round the edge of the city Rousseau lived in. In the Eighth he says he lodges in the middle of Paris and longs for the countryside the moment he steps out of his door. He had to go so far to reach it, past so many things that upset him, that half the day went by in distress before he got there.

After the accident he walked in the Tuileries, where people stared at him because they had heard he was dead. The Sixth Walk goes out past the barrière d'Enfer, on the southern edge of the city, towards the river Bièvre and Gentilly. A woman sold fruit and bread at the gate, and her little boy on crutches begged from passers-by and called Rousseau by name. Rousseau realised he had been taking a detour to avoid him.

The Ninth Walk has three more. Near Montmartre, in the village of Clignancourt, a child of five or six hugged his knees, and Rousseau went back to look for him more than once. On a Sunday he and Thérèse crossed the Bois de Boulogne to La Muette. There he paid a wafer-seller so that a whole group of little girls could each have a turn at the man's prize wheel. Rousseau says there were about twenty of them. He also liked to walk near the École Militaire, where old soldiers from the Invalides saluted him.

The Fifth Walk: a boat on Lake Bienne

Of all the places he had lived, Rousseau writes, none made him so happy as the island of Saint-Pierre in Lake Bienne, in Switzerland. He stayed there in 1765 after being driven out of Môtiers, until the Bern authorities ordered him to leave. Fifteen years later he still could not think of it without longing.

The walk tries to say what that happiness was. Rousseau says the best moments of his life were not the most intense ones. Intense pleasures are too short. Even in the keenest of them, he says, there is hardly a moment when the heart can truly wish it would last forever. What he missed was a steady state. He would lie in the boat and let it drift, or sit by the water, with no past and no future, feeling nothing but the fact of being alive.

Larousse describes the reverie in the same terms: a state of mind with no particular object, neither dream nor attention, in which a person feels simply alive and wholly present. The encyclopedia adds that in that state a person feels no regret, desire or worry.