{"id":162,"date":"2019-04-01T17:00:32","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T17:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=162"},"modified":"2018-07-02T14:47:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T14:47:26","slug":"visiting-rousseau-on-the-ile-st-pierre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=162","title":{"rendered":"Visiting Rousseau on the \u00cele St Pierre"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a9 Tourismus Biel Seeland<\/p>\n

Another month, another author\u2019s home. Those of you fond of mountains and lakes will be pleased to hear that we\u2019re heading out of Geneva, and making our way to the \u00cele St Pierre, for a brief six weeks of the summer of 1765 home to philosopher, novelist and essayist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).<\/p>\n

By the 1760s, visitors had begun to travel to Switzerland with their volumes of Rousseau in hand, drawn first by the smash-hit success of Rousseau\u2019s best-selling novel, Julie: ou, La Nouvelle H\u00e9l\u00f6ise<\/em> (1761). Boswell was one of the first of these sentimental tourists; when he visited in 1764 for instance, he self-identified as St Preux, the young lover of Julie, trying to locate and replicate his emotions upon the \u2018classic ground\u2019 of Clarens, Vevey and Meillerie. Later visitors wanted in addition to locate and replicate the emotions of \u2018Rousseau\u2019 himself, in places associated with the author through his posthumously published autobiographical writings \u2013 his Confessions <\/em>(1782) and an unfinished set of late essays, the title of which translates as The Reveries of a Solitary Walker <\/em>(1782).<\/p>\n

Lying well beyond the environs of Geneva, the \u00cele St Pierre is far more difficult to get to than the shores of Lac Leman, even today. It\u2019s tiny, in the middle of Lac Bienne, and there\u2019s nothing on it except an old farmhouse (now an inn) and on the little hill above it, an open pavilion like a bandstand. It is and was remote from the standard routes, and although you can now get to the island along a causeway, it is more fun to take a boat, disembarking at a little jetty where there is a monument to Rousseau. At the end of the eighteenth century, you needed to commandeer a rowing-boat and someone to row it, and it would take an hour-and-a-half, rain or shine, to get there. The draw was Rousseau\u2019s bedroom, and the idea of retracing the walks around the island that Rousseau had made famous in the fifth essay of his Reveries<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Friedrich von Matthisson\u2019s account of his trip to the \u00cele St Pierre in 1794, recorded in his Letters written from various parts of the Continent, between the years 1785 and 1794,<\/em> described how the philosopher\u2019s writings had come to inform the tourist\u2019s response to place:<\/p>\n

How deeply were we affected with reading this most interesting writer\u2019s description of St Peter\u2019s Island on the very spot. What a melancholy delight did we feel in following his footsteps \u2026 from the room he inhabited, \u2026 to the very spot on the shore, where on a fine evening he would stretch himself, contented and happy, with his eyes fixed on the flood, in the sweet calm of self-forgetfulness.<\/p>\n

Nicolai Karamzin\u2019s description of his visit a few years before (we\u2019ve already met him at Ferney) shows him not only following Rousseau\u2019s walks but imitating Rousseau\u2019s sentiments and style:<\/p>\n

Not long ago I went to the island of St Pierre, where the greatest writer of the eighteenth century took refuge from the wickedness and intolerance of mankind. \u2026 It was a beautiful day. Within a few hours I had wandered about the entire island, seeking everywhere traces of Geneva\u2019s citizen and philosopher, beneath the boughs of ancient beech and chestnut trees, in the beautiful walks of the dark forest, in the faded meadows and rocky prominences of the shore.<\/p>\n

\u2018Here\u2019 I thought, \u2018here, forgetting cruel and ungrateful people \u2013 ungrateful and cruel! My God! How sad it is to feel and to write! \u2013 here, forgetting all worldly tumult, he enjoyed the tranquil evening of life in solitude.\u00a0 Here his soul rested from its mighty labours.\u00a0 Here he found peace in quiet and sweet repose!\u00a0 Where is he?\u00a0 Everything remains as it was, but he is gone \u2013 gone!\u2019<\/p>\n

Now I thought I heard the forest and meadow sigh, or were they only repeating the deep sigh of my heart?\u00a0 I glanced about me.\u00a0 The entire island seemed in mourning\u2026I sat down upon the shore\u2026.My fancy imagined a boat gliding over the placid waters, moved by a gentle breeze which guided it in place of a helmsman. In the boat lay [the aged Rousseau] a venerable old man in Armenian dress; his eyes, fixed on heaven, reflected a noble soul, depth of thought, and pensiveness.<\/p>\n

Karamzin\u2019s experience is pleasingly conventional in its fanciful summoning of a vision of Rousseau to inhabit the emptiness of the island. Such productions of \u2018Rousseau\u2019 were a common feature of the experience of engaging with the spirit of place on the Ile St Pierre.<\/p>\n

As the accounts by these two young men suggest, visiting Rousseau\u2019s island meant becoming Rousseau. And this act of \u2018being\u2019 the author extended to becoming a writer yourself, through inscribing your own sentimental outpourings on the walls of Rousseau\u2019s bedroom and on the pillars of the pavilion perched above the farmhouse. (You can still see them scratched all over the window-frame, walls and ceiling.) This practice, which had begun in the 1790s, seems quickly to have gained momentum. In his guidebook to the \u00cele St Pierre (L\u2019\u00eele Saint-Pierre, ou L\u2019\u00eele de Rousseau<\/em>), printed in 1817, F.S. Wagner cites the mass of multi-lingual inscription in the pavilion and in Rousseau\u2019s bedchamber as evidence of the sheer amount of Rousseauistic experience supplied by the island to readers of many nationalities. The inscriptions he transcribes celebrate the reader\u2019s desire to put himself in Rousseau\u2019s place or to imagine an encounter with him. The first, translated, reads:<\/p>\n

Happy when I can, \u2026\/In these enchanted woods wander at random\/Sometimes to lie upon a grassy bank\/Sometimes in this room, surrounded by greenery\/Breathe alone the pure air\/And give myself up to reflection\/here renew my reading of Rousseau, my dear companion\/Here return, in his footsteps, into the bosom of nature\/And there, far from cities, far from all pretension\/Be at one with her.<\/p>\n

This act of reading Rousseau in his favourite haunts is elaborated into conversation with Rousseau\u2019s ghost in the other inscription that Wagner transcribes:<\/p>\n

One evening, in moonlight, wandering in this wood\/I found the wild and mournful shade of Rousseau\/\u2018What do you want?\u2019 he said, turning his eyes on me\/ \u2018The same as you, master, to admire these beautiful places.\u2019\/ \u2018You are right, all is beautiful,\u2019 said he, \u2018in nature\/Except man, who disfigures it.\u2019<\/p>\n

These transcriptions, suggest that the imagined figure of Rousseau authorised autobiographical travel narrative, first person inscription, and encounters between would-be Rousseauistic wanderers, in imitation of Rousseau\u2019s own writings.<\/p>\n

This brief account of Rousseau tourism shows that Rousseau was consumed by tourists – in a self-consciously Romantic fashion – as what we would now understand as a Romantic figure. Because his writings described a landscape of lake, mountain, and island as the ground of Romantic subjectivity, these landscapes came to provide locations within which nineteenth-century tourists could experimentally adopt this same subjectivity.<\/p>\n

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    \u00a9 Tourismus Biel Seeland Another month, another author\u2019s home. Those of you fond of mountains and lakes will be pleased to hear that we\u2019re heading out of Geneva, and making our way to the \u00cele St Pierre, for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[115,118,109,28,106,114,116,117,33,34,35,32,31,30,29,4,126,110,105],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ile-st-pierre","tag-f-s-wagner","tag-geneva","tag-history-of-reading","tag-james-boswell","tag-jean-jacques-rousseau","tag-julie-ou","tag-la-nouvelle-heloise","tag-literary-landmark","tag-literary-landscape","tag-literary-museums","tag-literary-pilgrimage","tag-literary-tourism","tag-literary-tourist","tag-love-of-literature","tag-nicola-watson","tag-nicola-watson-rousseau-on-the-tourist-trail","tag-nikolai-karamzin","tag-romanticism-rousseau-switzerland-new-propects-ed-angela-esterhammer-diane-piccitto-patrick-vincent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions\/166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}