The Baudelarian horsewoman

In Susanna Forrest’s Écuryères series, she unearths the lost stories of the transgressive horsewomen of turn-of-the-century Paris. 

Jenny de Rahden lies on the bed, half raised on an elbow. A gray-haired man who shares her elegant, strong-nosed profile—her father—stands over her, and behind him the room becomes shadow. 

In the photograph, Jenny lies on a strange counterpane, so great that it conceals the bed itself. Its overspilling edges are frilled, and it is white with large, dark, irregular spots. It has a curly, straggling tail: a horse in the invalid’s bedroom. She is thirty and she is blind, lying on the hide of the Hungarian stallion Csárdás, who carried her when she made her circus debut as a haute école or dressage performer. One day, she writes in her memoir, they’ll wrap Csárdás’s rough coat, the crackling hide that covered his aging, dipping back, around her and place her in her coffin. She hopes it comes soon.

HENRI DE TOULOUSE LAUTREC, DRESSAGE AT THE CIRCUS, 1899

Most of the écuyères or horsewomen of the nineteenth-century circus left no trace of their own thoughts behind. Jenny de Rahden wrote a book. Whether she did it because she needed money or needed to put down her own side of the story after years of being spoken for in the European press—or both—is unknowable but she called it a roman or novel. I can’t tell how much of it is genuine. Jenny lived in an era before fact-checking and though her life was undoubtedly tragic, her style is sometimes melodramatic. “Does life really throw up these bizarreries, of which novelists and playwrights seem to possess the only secret?” she asks at one point. Perhaps calling it a novel gave her freedom to rewrite a messier past and fit it into more conventional romantic feminine tropes, rejecting the saltier stories written about circus horsewomen by male writers of the period. She was, after all, writing in 1902 when the century had barely turned and respectability remained a stifling life vest for women. She’d known its constrictions and buoyancy since birth: Jenny was not circus-born and she had become an artiste to support her father when he bankrupted them by gambling on the stock exchange. As a performer, her reputation as a lady was constantly at risk, not least because she supported not one but two men with her earnings. This dance around sex, money, masculinity, and respectability deformed her whole life—and resulted in a murder in her name.

Le Roman de l’Écuyère tells a familiar tale of a girl from a good family whose mother, as in the best fairy tales, died on hearing her first cries on a stormy night full of omens, and a father who, like Beauty’s, ruined the family with foolish business decisions. The good heroine refused to sell herself in a marriage that would restore the family, and instead bought three magical horses with the last gift her mother left her: an Arabian, a Trakehner, and the spotted Csárdás. Aged just seventeen, she took her father and her faithful aunt Tantante from Breslau (then part of the German Empire, now Wrocław in Poland) to Riga where a circus director and his jealous wife cheated her and stole one of her horses, and a distinguished gentleman at a local newspaper came to her aid like an excellent fairy godmother and ensured her success. On she went on a path through the woods peopled by circus directors who pinched wages, by their wives and daughters who did not want her above them on the bill, and by men who threw roses at Csárdás’s hoofs and rattled the door of her dressing room.

From Riga she went to Moscow, from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, where she was adored. One local aristocrat presented her with a huge golden stirrup as a tribute to her skill and charm. Another Baron asked the circus director, “Is there a way of doing something with the little one?” He was told that she was a good girl with a father and aunt in tow. He stared at her with such intensity that she fell off her horse, and of course he was there to scoop her up and take her home.

Baron Oscar Wladimir de Rahden was the favored nephew of the empress’s lady-in-waiting, a rackety naval officer who slept with his colleague’s wives, ran up debts, and flew into duels at the slightest glancing brush to his honor. In Saint Petersburg, he was running out of favor, his aunt now dead. He liked Jenny. Respectfully, he visited and she found herself falling for this touchy hero. Her father disapproved, and his parents said they would disinherit him if he married an artiste. But they did marry, in Saint Catherine’s catholic church on Nevsky Prospekt. His parents cut him off. The Baron dedicated himself “to literature” and managing his wife’s career.

This Baron was built on a hair trigger, but he was a good man, according to Jenny the memoirist. It’s just that there were so many enemies out there when a woman was paid to perform before all eyes—the horse was no protection. There were men who did not always respect the écuyère’s art or wedding ring. In a portrait circulated by a photographer’s studio, she reclines, her bodice dabbed with stars, a feathered fan behind her head, looking more like an actress than a sober-suited horsewoman.

JENNY DE RAHDEN AND HER FEATHERED FAN

In Copenhagen, a young Danish lieutenant called Frederick Castenschiold befriended both Jenny and the Baron but fell in love with Jenny. The Baron could not withstand the insult, and a duel was called. Jenny was told the men were going duck hunting. When she arrived in the aftermath, breathless from a performance and a train ride, dazzling circles vibrating before her eyes, she found her Baron bandaged with a Turk’s turban, smoking and laughing with his friends. Castenschiold was the army’s best fencer and her sailor husband preferred pistols—he had taken a saber swipe to the temple from the Dane. The matter resolved, they proceeded to the actual duck hunt. The Baron gave Castenschiold a photograph of Jenny. Castenschiold was reprimanded in person by King Christian for dueling over a circus performer.

*

When Jenny first appeared at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris in October 1890, the critic and dramatist Jules Lemaître noted her conformation and that of Csárdás: “Very thin and very supple: a black thread; an elegant, dry little head, pale blonde hair tucked up under a top hat, with long kiss curls that cover half her cheeks and reach to the bottom of her ears, giving her pointy face a bizarre and disturbing air. She rides an equally bizarre big horse, pied as you’ve never seen before, riddled with ugly spots like ulcers, and which seems to be made of damp cardboard. She’s a Baudelairian horsewoman.”

Lemaître could not look away. “I don’t know if what she does is difficult, but it’s very arresting. At one point, the horse rears straight up, and the slender horsewoman bends right over backwards and dangles her head low … She has a bizarre fashion of saluting too, a composite of a feminine curtsey and a masculine salute. Go see her. In short, she’s very fin de siècle. I don’t know exactly what that means, but that’s what she is.”

Other commentators were keen to relate the story of the duel and the dramatic husband. The Baron wasn’t, as one writer later put it, the only “horse eating at the baroness’ manger.” There was also her father, David. Jenny paid him off when she married and sent him home. Then she called him back.

In Paris, the couple seldom went out. The Baron was always present, even at the circus—no one could talk to Jenny without him there. She was hotly applauded every night after her “brilliant” debut. From Paris, they went on to Italy, and in Milan they lost Tantante to blood poisoning, leaving just Jenny, her father and husband. Jenny earned the cash as the Baron wrote the odd article about Siberia and her father lagged along.

In Turin in May, the Baron managed two duels in one day after a count sent Jenny love letters “in the language of Dante” and, peeved that she did not respond, brought friends to her next performance and blew a whistle throughout. The Baron slapped him; honor was demanded. The Baron slashed the count’s neck with a saber (the count survived), refreshed himself with some marsala, then tackled the count’s friend, the best fencer in Italy, who caught the Baron’s face and then, after “halt” was called, stabbed the Baron in the shoulder. The Baron throttled him and knocked him over. Nobody’s honor was satisfied, but the duels were at least over.

At Asti, another man threw white roses into the ring as Jenny performed, and her horse, startled, leapt into the audience and landed on an old lady, who had to be paid off from Jenny’s meager buffer against destitution. In Lisbon, there was a man who was sure he could perform Jenny’s best trick. He came to the circus with his wife and son, strapped a Mexican saddle to his horse so he would stick, and up he and his horse went in a rear and didn’t stop till they were both on their backs and his leg was broken. So then all of Lisbon was angry that their best “sportsman” had been injured by a woman’s circus trick.

Madrid. Seville. On an afternoon’s outing, Jenny seized a man’s revolver and shot a runaway fighting bull that had disemboweled two mules and turned on her carriage. Malaga. Barcelona. Here, as Jenny joined the Circus Allegria, the Danish lieutenant Castenschiold reappeared like a bad penny, trailing tales of Monte Carlo debts and army discharges. He had been, he said, in Egypt and fighting rebels in the Sudan. He had no money and would like to work in a circus. When the Baron questioned him, he waved a knife at the Russian. The Baron turned his back, and the next day word in the circus said that Castenschiold had left for the Americas. He had not.

At Clermont-Ferrand, in central France, it became clear that Castenschiold was following them. He knew where Jenny kept her horses and lingered nearby. The Baron visited the police, who told him not to worry, even when he said he would defend his wife with his revolver.

BARONNE JENNY DE RAHDEN (BORN EUGENIE WEISS)

August 23, 1890. Jenny was standing backstage beside her horse before her performance, the Baron at her shoulder, when Castenschiold materialized before them in the corridor that ran around the circus arena. The Baron, seeking to avoid what was barreling toward the three of them, turned and walked away around the curve of the corridor. Castenschiold spun on his heels and ran in the other direction, hurrying to meet him. They clashed. The Dane raised his stick and struck the Russian. The Russian drew his revolver and his fingers convulsed on the trigger. Jenny, buttoning her gloves, heard the two shots. Then two more.

She found the Dane bleeding on the floor, asking for someone to bring him two photographs—of his mother and of Jenny. The Baron walked past Jenny without seeing her. “Tell my wife I did my duty,” said his mustache, as he asked for an absinthe at the circus bar. The police took him into custody. Castenschiold died twenty hours later. In his rooms, they found a portrait of Jenny and a box containing unsigned letters from a woman, and more photographs of the Baronne de Rahden. In accordance with Castenschiold’s dying wish, this box was burned.

Now every circus director in Europe wanted Jenny, and her Baron, a tiger pacing in his jail cell, waiting for his trial, urged her not to lose her career. Those horses—equine and human—weren’t going to feed themselves. So she took on the best offer although it took her to Paris, which had caught scent of her scandals, and not a circus but a theater: the Folies Bergères.

Eight square meters is all the Folies Bergères gave her to perform on. They nailed coconut matting over the sloping boards and it shifted under the horses’ feet, making them uneasy. No barrier was mounted at the edge of the stage, just the flaring footlight reflectors, and at first the orchestra refused to perform with her, picturing a half ton of Csárdás smashing violins and skulls. When they saw her rehearse, they were won over, because Jenny and her horses were a miracle, a cavalcade on a pinhead.

Let me tell you about the duel Jenny undertook every night, as the men twirled flowers and pistols in the background:

She entered on a horse who bounded to the edge of the stage, his forehoofs thudding just above the heads of the orchestra as they played. Like dancers, she and and the horse stepped to the left and then to the right, the horse’s rigid frame flexing and his legs crisscrossing. They cantered around that eight-meter square space, then dashed across the ring, peeling back in tighter circles, once in each direction. Then she made him skip before they completed pirouettes and left the stage in a high-kneed Spanish walk.

She was back then on another horse, Da Capo, at a gallop, rucking up the matting as they halted. Across the stage and then another pirouette, and then with her hands and her stick she made Da Capo rear and then bow. There were four fences set in a square, and they leapt in and out of the box always, always in that eight … meter … square. The horse stopped dead in the center for a beat, then jumped out from a standstill. They ended with her most dangerous move: Da Capo walking on his hind legs like a bear, and Jenny bent back against the resistance of her corset and hung by her knee from the pommel of the sidesaddle, her head resting at the top of his tail. The first night, Da Capo toppled over backward onto her, pinning her for a second before she could pull herself clear. Miraculously she was only bruised. The barrel of the pistol had spun to an empty chamber.

She returned for her applause on foot and as she raised her top hat Da Capo careered on with neither saddle not bridle and took his own bow. He lay down at her feet and she sat on him. The audience was in raptures; the fee was 1,500 francs a month. Ten days after Castenchiold’s death, a critic wrote that he had seen her flirting with young men backstage.

*

The trial gives me a chance to break away from the strange, rhapsodic darkness of Jenny’s roman. Here, for once, there are other witnesses. The Paris papers sent their best men to cover the Baron’s trial, and when Jenny was fenced into another cramped space—the witness box—another story emerged in the questions the lawyers put to Jenny and her father. That tale splits away from the spare account of proceedings that Jenny the author later gave.

JENNY DE RAHDEN AND CSÁRDÁS

In this story, the Baron was a drunk who sank “cup after cup” of absinthe and cognac and treated his wife “like a filthy cow” and his father-in-law “like an old dog” (“He only drank when he got jealous!” protested Jenny in the witness box.) His eyes were small, his face “extremely hard.” The groom said he took out his drunken temper on the horses. In this story, Jenny brought her father back to live with them as protection, and her father confided in a maid that he would prefer rich, young Castenschiold as a son-in-law. In this story, Jenny might, just might, have written those burned letters to the young Dane and told him how to follow them to Clermont-Ferrand. In this story, Castenschiold was visited by a tall, slender woman in a white veil and heliotrope dress that his landlady identified as the Baronne de Rahden.

Jenny stood with her teeth gritted, refusing to answer most of the questions posed to her:

“You perhaps encouraged Castenschiold a little to pursue you?”

She lowers her head without saying yes or no.

“The evening before the murder your husband hit you and your father.”

“I don’t remember.”

The Baron was unmoved. When the jury withdrew, the reporters saw her go to him, “with the moist eyes of a beaten dog that wants to be beaten again,” and say a few words in German to her grim, furious husband. He smiled.

The judge told him off for letting his wife risk her life in the circus. One reporter suggested that he was defending his meal ticket as much as his wife’s honor. But the Baron was deemed not guilty—this was self defense, not premeditated murder—and finally, his composure cracked and he cried. The women in the courtroom swooned at the romance of it. Jenny nearly collapsed; she had leapt out of the square of fences once again, but where had she landed? One reporter saw the Baron as he went to collect Jenny after the trial: “They remained silent for a moment; he always glacial; her frozen, cheeks scarlet, eyes shining.” As he took a step toward her, she backed up in fear and ran away weeping.

Who is being melodramatic here? Jenny, the landlady, or the court reporter? Jenny sums up the court case in a brief chapter of her memoir and does not mention the heliotrope dress or her own interrogation. She is a faithful, distressed wife willing the jury to set her husband free. One journalist notes that the Baron was the “defender of her glory and her virtue,” and “she loved him in that role.”

That evening the couple—and her father—were on the train back to Paris so she could perform. Their life on the road continued, but the wheels were wobbling on their axles. Jenny performed as Leo in Pirates de la Savane —the role made famous by Adah Isaacs Menken thirty years earlier and for which Sarah l’Africaine was once touted—even though it meant swapping her respectable habit, the one buttoned to the neck, in favor of something scanty, and being tied to a galloping horse’s back. “She’s not scared of anything, La Rahden,” said someone leaving the theater. In her memoir, she doesn’t mention that the Baron tried to become a circus performer himself during this period—he was billed as a sharpshooter trained on the Mongolian steppe. He challenged Buffalo Bill Cody to a shoot off for his Paris debut. Cody ignored him, though the Baron did perform in the provinces instead. He made some money in a shooting match and they took it to a casino. The next year, Jenny pivoted to acting on the stage in Hamburg. This also went unmentioned in her memoirs.

In Jenny’s version, at this point, a deus ex machina of sorts appeared in Berlin. A Russian officer approached the Baron and said he would endorse his return to the Russian Navy, but only if La Baronne retired from the stage. A Russian officer could not be supported by an artiste no matter how meager his new salary. The Baron wished it; Jenny held back.

“I had my will, I had one goal in mind, that I was fixed on achieving. And I would not take a step away from the path that would lead me to this goal: independence,” Jenny wrote—shades of the teenage girl who had refused to marry her family out of trouble. But she would never say in her memoir that she could not rely on the dueling, gambling, tempestuous man she married to support her and her father for more than a month at a time, and that there was much, too, in the plaudits, in being the only one who could do that dangerous trick. The “little one” in the top hat on the expensive Hungarian horse from Maas. The horseshoe broach at her throat; the golden stirrups. But the Baron, while sympathetic, wanted to finally man up and rescue her from the circus. They made preparations to sell two of Jenny’s horses.

But what about Csárdás? He was blind. The flare of the footlights had permanently dazzled his great brown eyes. He still performed with Jenny, his trust in her and hers in him absolute, but on the Baron’s wages there was no money to feed the actual horse that had earned his keep for years. Jenny’s heart was wrung: “Ah! It’s cruel and hard to be obliged to separate oneself from a being you hold to heart … My life was intimately tied to that of this poor animal! And I must quit him now, as I would quit my past existence, my success and my career as an artiste.”

*

They did not return to Russia, in the end. Csárdás did not die. The Baron did—felled by a lung infection. Jenny sat and watched as the life rattled out of him and he turned to her and said: Ne tombe pas avec le cheval.

“Don’t fall with the horse.” She was, she wrote, now dead, too, as far as she was concerned. Her “good and loving” husband, so “wrongly judged” by many, was buried and her distress was so complete that the doctors tried to stop her riding. She was consumed with anxiety and headaches. “The life of an écuyère is neither a pleasure nor a joke,” she wrote, her health slowly breaking and her nerve faltering.

 But there was no one else to support her and her father if she wasn’t in the ring: the horses were not sold; Csárdás lived on. She was legged back into her saddle and on tour across Europe, losing nights to fever and fear. Then one morning, she opened her eyes and was blind. Her screams woke the hotel.

The doctors said that a surge of blood had ripped her retina and severed the optic nerve.

By now she was dogged, an arrow angled at fate; when that night’s circus director suggested that she could still perform, reading aloud the cost of lost receipts to her, she began to think that with dear, blind Csárdás she could trim their routine to satisfy the people who had paid to see La Baronne. Csárdás had never betrayed her, but she signed off fatalistically: “If this adventurous attempt fails, if God disapproves of my act, let his will be done! Better to die under the public eye in the course of my profession than remain condemned to a desolate life, a cursed existence. Death would be a deliverance.” The pistol was cocked; the duel with death was called.

JENNY DE RAHDEN’S SIGNATURE TRICK

In the wings, she heard the crowds but her focus was only on Csárdás as he moved under her. A wild energy surged through her in the blackness, and Csárdás felt it—he didn’t like it. The stallion froze. Jenny cued him. He began to resist. Csárdás had felt the sump at their feet, the deliverance Jenny sought, and now he backed away, “as if from an abyss.” And Jenny, for the first time, raised her whip. When it struck the stallion he reared up. He touched down and then leapt forward, and “I had the confused sensation that we were tumbling into the void, into a bottomless precipice, into the immeasurable nothing.” As she whiplashed off the saddle, Jenny struck a column at the edge of the stage and the blackness was absolute. It lasted for seven days.

Jenny dictated this roman from the bed in the photograph where she lies on Csárdás. She is glad, she writes, that her husband did not live to see her in this dingy room in Boulogne, this void with floral curtains. Csárdás is still her companion, she adds, and she has a letter from Castenschiold’s mother offering her deepest sympathy. 

What grace, what pure and grand consolation. She was not, she says, fitted with the lightness of heart required for the life of an artiste; her education and temperament forbade it. The golden age of the circus horsewoman was over by the early 1900s just as the era of the horse peaked and began a long, slow fade that filled the streets with automobiles. In Jenny’s future lay a brief, failed career as a singer, and when she died in 1921, the Paris papers remembered seeing her in her retirement, being steered around the Bois de Boulogne in a carriage, ignored by all the current belles.

I hope they wrapped her in Csárdás at the end, and let him carry her over to the other side.

Susanna Forrest is the author of The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History and If Wishes Were Horses. She’s currently working on a third book and a series of essays about circus horsewomen in nineteenth-century Paris.

(Source: The Paris Review)

What Rousseau knew about solitude

In his last unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, composed in the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau set forth his vision for a writing life lived beyond the confines of community: “So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own… [D]etached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry.”

After a scandal erupted in 1762 about the unorthodox religion in one of his books, Rousseau spent the next eight years in exile from Paris, wandering around Switzerland, England, and the French provinces. Having previously occupied a place at the center of civilized society—secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, friend of the philosopher Diderot, protected by rich patrons, “acclaimed, made much of, and welcomed with open arms”—Rousseau became gripped by the paranoid belief that he was an object of universal derision. “The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by all the rest. With all the ingenuity of hate they have sought out the cruellest torture for my sensitive soul, and have violently broken all the threads that bound me to them.”

By the time he returned to Paris in 1770, Rousseau was one of the most famous men in Europe, known popularly by his first name and revered by many of his contemporaries. In spite of this celebrity, he chose to live quietly with his companion Thérèse in a modest flat near the Palais-Royal, occupying his time with music, botany, and country walks.

“Alone for the rest of my life”—in Rousseau’s eyes, female companionship did not obviate his own special class of solitude—“since it is only in myself that I find consolation, hope and peace of mind, my only remaining duty is towards myself and this is all I desire… Let me give myself over entirely to the pleasure of conversing with my soul, since this is the only pleasure that men cannot take away from me.”

ALLAN RAMSAY, JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, 1766

Claiming to be no longer concerned about his reputation—“the desire to be better known to men has died in my heart”—Rousseau decided that his next project would be a simple one: he would walk, he would think, he would write down the thoughts that came to him. His Reveries would be nothing less than a faithful record of his friendless perambulations and the daydreams which occupied them. 

“I will give free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfined. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day when I am completely myself and my own master, with nothing to distract or hinder me, the only ones when I can truly say that I am what nature meant me to be.”

In Rousseau’s scheme of things, solitude was the natural human state. By stepping outside of society, by distancing oneself from other voices, one was facilitating a return to oneself. But being with oneself is one thing; writing about the state of being with oneself, another. There are ten walks in the Reveries (“First Walk,” “Second Walk,” et cetera), and although some of them may well record the thoughts that occurred to Rousseau as he ambled around Paris, what they amount to are carefully crafted reflections on his life and earlier writing. The Reveries are not the spontaneous jottings of a dreamer, nor do they attempt to mount an illusion of such spontaneity. Rather, they are the work of a stationary body—a bent back, a cramped wrist, a strained eye, an aching temple—as it worked to broaden and deepen certain fleeting images, particular flashes of insight, into a sustained, intelligible vision.

“I shall content myself with keeping a record of my readings without trying to reduce them to a system. My enterprise is like Montaigne’s, but my motive is entirely different, for he wrote his essays only for others to read, whereas I am writing down my reveries for myself alone. If, as I hope, I retain the same disposition of mind in my old extreme old age, when the time of my departure draws near, I shall recall in reading them the pleasure I have in writing them and by thus reviving times past I shall as it were double the space of my existence.”

I feel it is safe to contradict Rousseau on this: such a sentence—so elaborately constructed, so fine—was not written for the author’s sole benefit. It was not scribbled into his diary and put away. Not enjoyed in private before being burned in his fire. Rather it was turned around. Broken up. Pieced into shape. Tinkered with and worried over. With the expectation, the presumption even, that it would be published and consumed by others. Rousseau’s demands on his sentences were great, as were his demands on his imagined audience. Unable to realize his ideal of true friendship between men, despairing of human incapacity for social harmony, he retreated to his natural state, communed with himself in nature—and what he found there, unvanquished, as vital as ever, was his longing for society. The Reveries are the result of Rousseau’s discovery that the physical state of detachment from community does not erase community from the mind; that, on the contrary, detachment inflates the importance of community in one’s thinking about the self, and fuels the desire to make oneself known to community, even if only to convey one’s condemnation of it.

This is not to say that nature (as opposed to human society) plays an insignificant role in Reveries. On several occasions, Rousseau describes the feelings inspired in him by the landscapes he encounters. He feels happiness and tranquillity when walking through open fields. He expresses delight on noticing specific rare plants. In “Second Walk,” on seeing a star-filled sky, he experiences nothing less than a moment of rapture: “I was conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, I did not know who I was, nor where I was… I felt through my whole being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.”

Likewise, Rousseau does not fail to produce long passages of philosophizing. Much of “Fourth Walk,” for instance, is devoted to a discussion of truth and falsity. And in “Sixth Walk” he tackles the question of causality in human actions.

But underneath the calm layered over the melancholy, coming after the ecstasy, threaded through the philosophical reasoning, is anxiety. In articulating his new solitude, Rousseau cannot help returning, over and over again, to the old community that he claims to have left behind: “Lonely mediation, the study of nature and the contemplation of the universe lead the solitary to aspire continually to the maker of all things and to seek with a pleasing disquiet for the purpose of all he sees and the cause of all he feels. When my destiny cast me back into the torrent of this world, I found nothing there which could satisfy my heart for a single moment. Regret for the sweet liberty I had lost followed me everywhere and threw a veil of indifference or distaste over everything around me which might have brought me fame and fortune.”

Rousseau’s expressed distaste for fame and fortune masks an obsession with those whom he believes possess the authority to apportion such fame and fortune. His disregard for the opinion of others is actually a susceptibility to those opinions, a susceptibility of an acuteness that today would be called neurotic. Looking at himself through the eyes of society, he is “a monster,” “a poisoner,” “an assassin,” “a horror of the human race,” “a laughingstock.” He imagines passersby spitting on him. He pictures his contemporaries burying him alive. Rumors about him are, he believes, circulating in the highest echelons: “I heard even the King himself and the Queen were talking about it as if there was no doubt about it.” There is simply no one left in society who does not harbor “some secret animosity” toward him, who does not “take part in the universal conspiracy” against him.

Responding to these imagined attacks, in the course of his protestations of innocence, Rousseau makes a second discovery. Human judgments, he realizes, are made not about a thing but about one’s perception of a thing: “[I]nstead of me they will never see anyone but the Jean-Jacques they have created and fashioned for themselves so that they can hate me to their heart’s content. I should be wrong then to be upset by the image they have of me; I ought to take no real interest in it, since it is not me that they are seeing.”

This is Rousseau at his most ingenious. How right he is. Anyone professing to be judging him would, it is true, be judging a figment of their own minds, which they mistake for him. How could they be judging the real Rousseau when it is impossible to subsume a material man, with all his contents, into the immaterial world of thoughts? Close your eyes, torturers, and see where your Rousseau has gone! Yet here Rousseau himself has a blind spot. He fails to see that what is the case for others must also be the case for himself. Rousseau, too, in his judgments of society, has fashioned for himself a figment, which he chooses to hate in the most exquisite mode possible: disdain. “I have regained my peace and tranquillity and lead a quiet and happy life in the midst of them, laughing at the incredible tortures my persecutors are constantly inflicting on themselves while I live in peace, busy with my flowers, stamens and such childish things, and never giving them a moment’s thought… My contemporaries will always be as nothing in my eyes… I feel too much above them to hate them.”

Here Rousseau—man of letters, dedicated to the uncovering of privately reasoned truths to counteract the fraudulent assumptions of society—is being disingenuous. To say one is not thinking of a thing is, in fact, to think about that thing. To call one’s enemies nothing is to call them something. To pity oneself, to assign for oneself the role of victim—“when I reach places where there is no trace of men I breathe freely, as if I were in a refuge where their hate could no longer pursue me”—far from being a diminishment of oneself, is the back route, the concealed pass to the self’s most bountiful feeding grounds.

For Rousseau, solitude is the promise of immunity from the hatred of others. Reveries is his attempt to build a quarantine out of words. Piled around himself are his judgments of society, which he believes society’s own judgments cannot penetrate. But then these self-made walls end up closing in on him, oppressing him just as the society’s walls had once done. In his enclosure, cut off from his tormentors, the one who must be made to suffer is himself. “God is just; his will is that I should suffer, and he knows my innocence… Let men and fate do their worst, we must learn to suffer in silence, everything will find its proper place in the end and sooner or later my turn will come.”

Enclosed in his self-isolation, Rousseau sets himself the task of conceiving a pure kind of writing, one protected from all contact with society. A writing independent of received opinions. A writing free of “hair-splitting metaphysical subtleties” and “the sophistries of the eloquent,” A writing “adopted by my reason, confirmed by my heart and bearing the seal of my conscience uninfluenced by passion.” A writing made by and meant for himself alone. And in this, Rousseau fails. Not because he does not try hard enough; not because he is not brilliant enough, but rather because the task he sets himself is impossible. His writing, like all writing, must by necessity come contaminated by the writing of others, and it will always already be thus.

Where does writing come from? The answer—for Rousseau, for me, for you, for us—is other writing. This is the problem that Rousseau is really fleeing from; his failure to ever really shake this problem off is what, more than any slander society can fling at him, accounts for his suffering.

Like Rousseau, it might appear to us that our writing comes from a realm of experience entirely separate from words on a page: from the world “out there” or from our experience “in here.” But this is an illusion. What happens in life—what we do, what happens to us, what we hear about, what we witness, and how we experience all of that within—does not come to us in a pure state in the present but is mediated through our minds, which orders and interprets the information (which by now has passed into the past) according to stories it has previously constructed to judge and to explain such information. What stories are we telling about the world and our inner experience? They are the world and our inner experience, as our mind knows them. Whatever these stories are, when we come to write them down—as fiction or as nonfiction—we begin to see that we are no longer dealing with “the outer world” or “inner experience,” but have entered negotiations with the way these stories have already been told, with what has already been written (which is how we gain our understanding of the world in the first place).

It is by reading about what has happened to us as a text—images, events, body language, emotions—that we build our life stories. And it is by reading how others have interpreted those texts of their own that we learn how to write.

There is no mystery to creation. To create is to respond. The question is not, What am I writing about?, but rather, What am I responding to? No writing exists that is not a response to something in the past. This is as true for writing set in the so-called present and the so-called future as it is for writing set decades or centuries ago. There is no writing that is not an attempted act of communication: it is alone among art forms in its primary desire to contain transmissible meaning; meaning that, once transmitted, will engender further meaning. What we learn from Rousseau is that, in the act of writing, we are responding not to a thing but to our belief about a thing. A description of a thing is, at base, a statement of belief. And all statements of belief—even those that appear to be deeply personal, like “I love you”—are restatements of the beliefs of others (which is not to say we do not feel love, but that what we name as love, we learn from stories).

Which is all to say: writing, as a pursuit, is less daunting than Rousseau makes it out to be. By letting go of the idea that our writing must be absolutely ours, that it must come exclusively from us, untouched by outside influences, we come closer to seeing writing for what it is, and we stop being so afraid of it.

For really it is quite simple. If we can think of something, it already exists. Other people, in other places, at other times have passed it to us, and now it is ours. How do we know it is ours? Because we are thinking it. And from this thought springs another, and that is ours, too. Join the two thoughts together. Turn them around. Break them up. Splice them. Then we have begun.

We do not need to invent anything. All we have to do is find where to begin, and then to speak, embellishing nothing, denying nothing and without the intent to manipulate anyone. How good the result turns out to be will depend, not only on how much writing we have read, and how closely we have read it, but also how skillfully and confidently we have made that writing our own.

Rousseau writes: “Nothing that comes from the outside can be prolonged within me.” Yet anything that enters his writing from the inside must also have come from the outside (for he was not born with it), and anything that enters his writing from the outside must also have come from the inside (for, in order to understand the writing of others, we seek their reflection within ourselves).

This year—2020—the term “self-isolation” has expanded its meaning for writers: from a voluntary separation intended to protect our writing minds from the distractions of community, to a government-ordered separation for the purpose of protecting the physical health of the community. In the normal course of events, when we, as writers, are kept from our desks, we often dream of being at our desks; now that we have been confined to our bedrooms and studios and sheds, how do we feel in ourselves? Are we longing, all of a sudden, for the community that, just days ago, we had treated as an obstacle to our creativity, an annoyance to cancel out?

To be alone—even when we desire it—necessarily constitutes a loss. When we write, we write for ourselves in order that, one day, our selves might be read by others. This longing for contact, for human society, is apparent in every word we place on the page. As writers, we are in a state of constant agitation to get away, to nature, to silence, to that ideal place that will give us the space to hear ourselves and the time to write it all down. But, at the same time, we will never be able to overcome our longings for closeness, for communion. Contained within writing is a rebellion: against certain systems, against certain ideas, against certain people. And, at the same time, writing is a plea for belonging.

At this moment, I am picturing a woman declaiming poetry from her balcony. A child calling a telephone hotline to hear a bedtime story. A man in a face mask and plastic gloves delivering a book to my neighbor’s door, leaving it on the mat and ringing the doorbell and waiting there, a safe two steps away, until my neighbor appears in her dressing gown and picks it up: hundreds of pages of someone else’s writing sterile under a plastic wrapping.

Now—the wrapping off, the cover opened—that writing is hers; she will recognize much of it; what appears new or strange to her will merely be those things she didn’t know she knew.

When we publish our writing, we are not sending something away from its home; rather, we are sending something back from whence it came. Once we have rehoused it in someone else’s hands; once we have been told it is bad, and once we have been told it is good; once we have gained the attention we have always wanted, and once we have pretended never to have wanted such attention; once all of that is done, and we are satisfied and unsatisfied both, we will be ready, again, to isolate ourselves, of our own volition, as we attempt to commune through words with others.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Coronavirus: Paris bans daytime outdoor exercise

Authorities in Paris have banned exercise outside during the day, as deaths from coronavirus continue to rise in France daily.

The new rules are in force between 10:00 and 19:00 local time, and come into effect on Wednesday.

The death toll in France has risen above 10,000 - the fourth-highest figure after Italy, Spain and the US.

The toll in French hospitals - not counting care homes - was 607 for the past 24 hours, health officials said.

The total now is 10,328, a rise of 16% compared with the Monday total. However, the latest data for care homes is not complete.

Paris residents face further restrictions on exercise. Getty Images

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and the chief of police said the new jogging rules would make people exercise "when the streets are generally at their quietest".

• Italy, with the world's highest death toll, registered 604 coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours. So its downward trend is continuing - the figure on Monday was 636. The total has now reached 17,127
• Spain, the second worst-hit country, saw a rise in deaths for the first time in five days on Tuesday - 743, compared to 637 in the previous 24 hours. That pushed the total to 13,798, but the percentage daily increase is about half the level that Spain had a week ago

The Paris daytime jogging ban followed a sunny weekend marked by large groups of people running and walking in the city's parks, despite police controls that include fines for violating the lockdown.

On Tuesday, French Health Minister Olivier Véran said the outbreak had yet to reach its peak, telling broadcaster BFMTV, "We are still in a worsening phase of the epidemic."

France has been under strict lockdown measures for almost a month. Anyone who goes outside is required to carry a document stating their reason for leaving home: shopping for necessities, visiting a doctor, or exercise within 1km (half a mile) of their address.

Police have fined hundreds of thousands of people for breaking the tight restrictions.

There have been positive signs that the outbreak may be slowing. Monday's figures from the French health ministry showed only a small rise of people who need intensive care treatment.

But there have also been concerns about the situation in French care homes. Until recently, reported deaths from the virus only included those who died in hospitals, and not elsewhere.

Mr Véran on Monday announced there would be a "vast operation" nationwide to screen nursing homes, their residents and their careworkers, in a bid to tackle the crisis there.

(Source: BBC)

The morning when normal ended: A personal account of September 11

Author of the 2012 bestseller ‘The Expats’, Chris Pavone’s latest thriller ‘The Paris Diversion’ takes place in the French capital as it faces multiple terror attacks. Eighteen years on, the New Yorker recalls the horror of 9/11 and its aftermath, and how it has informed his writing…

On 10 September 2001, I went to bed with a stuffy head, and took a decongestant. So on the 11th I awoke late, groggy. My wife had already left for work. Our dog kept me company while I shaved and showered, dressed and caffeinated. I was aiming to leave for the office by a quarter to nine.

I was one minute late.

Smoke pours from the twin towers of the World Trade Centre after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack ( Getty )

So it was 8.46am when I bent to say goodbye to Charlie Brown, and off to the side some fast movement caught my eye, with a whirr-whoosh that sounded like a cartoon version of an incoming missile, some disaster about to befall Wile E Coyote. I spun my head to the window where the noise had shot by, but I saw nothing. I stood up. I turned to the south. That’s when I saw.

This was not a great apartment. But one corner of the loft was lined with huge windows that faced the Hudson River to the west, and the World Trade Centre just a couple of blocks to the south. The view was breathtaking, the immensity of the towers filling your field of vision. Sometimes I’d just sit and stare at the towers, awestruck.

Now, at 8.47 on a Tuesday morning, I was staring at a hole in one of the buildings. 

I immediately called my wife, told her, “I think the World Trade Centre just got hit by a missile.” I turned on the television, which was at first reporting nothing definitive, but the situation was definitely alarming. I was still staring out the window, listening to nothing on the TV, when the second plane hit. The fireball briefly looked like it was never going to stop expanding, it would engulf me. I flinched away, nearly toppled over my chair.

Now we knew that New York was being attacked. But was that attack finished? Or were these planes just the first two salvos of a massive bombardment, an invasion of the country, the end of the world as we know it?

I definitely didn’t want to go outside. Our home was surrounded by high-value targets – City Hall, Wall Street, both the New York and the American Stock Exchanges, the Federal Building, every level of government and finance, the main switching station for transatlantic and East Coast telephone calls, big bridges and long tunnels, all this crucial infrastructure was right out the door. Back in college in the 1980s, I’d taken a poli-sci class called War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, and one of our assignments was to determine the single spot in the entire world that could do the most damage – human fatalities, economic disruption, political upheaval – with a modest-sized nuclear device. Everyone in the class came up with the same answer: that spot was right here. It was demonstrable; it was math.

What was I going to do? I definitely wasn’t going to the office. But should I be behaving as if the city was being invaded? What would that behaviour look like?

I started to notice pieces of building falling off a tower, one bit after another, from the very top. This didn’t make sense, I didn’t see any damage up there. So I looked more carefully. Those were not bits of building. Those were people. They were jumping off the roof, a thousand feet in the sky.

A firefighter breaks down after the Twin Towers collapse (Getty)

When the south tower began to collapse, for the briefest second it wasn’t obvious to me what was happening, then I understood, but it still wasn’t thoroughly clear how exactly the building was going to fall, or how much of it, or in what direction, and if that tower fell over like a lumberjacked tree, and tipped my way, it would land on me.

When the debris cloud hit, the building shivered, and I heard a small crash, like someone had dropped a wineglass at a party
The immense cloud of dust and debris came hurtling towards me, a terrifying mass containing... what? Girders, I-beams, mammoth chunks of concrete, who the hell knew, maybe the entire collapsing building was in that cloud – was that cloud – headed my way at a hundred miles an hour, two hundred, who could tell? So I picked up Charlie Brown and fled from whatever was going to come crashing through the window, through the walls, through the roof. I shut us in the dark of the windowless bathroom.

I thought: I might be about to die. Right now.

When the debris cloud hit, the building shivered, and I heard a small crash, like someone had dropped a wineglass at a party. Was this the last noise I’d ever hear? I waited, my hands shaking as I stroked the dog, my heart racing...


After a few seconds of nothing, I opened the door.

Smoke and wreckage of the World Trade Centre two days after the terrorist attack (Getty)

I hadn’t turned on any lights that morning, because it was a spectacularly beautiful day, as usual for that time of year; I have since come to think of it as 11 September weather. But now the rooms were almost completely dark in the blackout of that cloud. I couldn’t see anything out the windows, just thick dark greyness pushing up against the glass, like Stephen King’s fog. I turned on lights. The sound of shattering glass? That was a picture that had been shaken off the wall.

I couldn’t even see the building across the street, 40ft away. But the cloud slowly dispersed until finally I could dimly make out the World Trade Centre site, where there was now only one Twin Tower. Was there really nothing left?

The cop was there to enter every home before the residents, to look around quickly for anything horrifying that might have come hurtling through a window. I heard that people had found body parts
Just a few minutes later, the other building came down.  How did I not see that coming?

I eventually went downstairs, outside, to reconnaissance. It was slow-motion chaos out there, shell-shocked people staggering through the mess, papers fluttering in the sky, everything under a thick coat of ash, like fresh snow. The only thing that seemed to be happening quickly were the sirens, they were wailing from every direction, fast-moving vehicles somewhere I couldn’t see. I found a policeman, who told me I should prepare to leave, the electricity was going to be turned off, the gas, the water too, all for safety. My building was going to be evacuated. The whole neighbourhood.


So in the middle of the afternoon, I left home carrying a single change of clothing, and basic toiletries, and a couple of meals for Charlie Brown. My dog and I trudged through the ash across City Hall Park, up and over the Brooklyn Bridge, from which I couldn’t stop turning back to look over my shoulders, where there were no Twin Towers left at all.

It didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t step back into our home for two weeks, and even then it was only a brief visit on a grim Sunday, accompanied by a police escort who was there to make sure we didn’t stay, or stick around too long. Also the cop was there to enter every home before the residents, to look around quickly for anything horrifying that might have come hurtling through a window. I heard that people had found body parts.

My wife and dog and I were living with relatives uptown, in a spare bedroom. Indefinitely.


We were finally allowed to move home in mid-October. Our neighbourhood had become the Frozen Zone, spanning a few blocks in every direction from Ground Zero, penned in by thousands of feet of newly erected chain link patrolled by National Guardsmen in battle fatigues and helmets carrying assault rifles, militarised checkpoints, we had to present ID to prove our residency, our identity. The local school had been repurposed as a staging area for a rescue effort that never rescued a single person; then for the recovery, the cleanup.

People stand transfixed as flames sweep through one of the Towers (Getty)

The thing that’s impossible to understand if you weren’t there was the smell. Those massive piles of rubble – what was left of two tremendous buildings, each more than a quarter-mile tall – those piles were on fire for one hundred days, acrid clouds of smoke that weren’t fully extinguished until mid-December. The stench was sickening. The sounds of the earth-movers constant. The stadium lights glared all through the night, every night. The armoured vehicles and uniformed men, weapons everywhere: a warzone.

But by 13 September I’d returned to work. I was 33 years old, married but childless, a moment in life when nothing seems as important as career. So of course I went back to work. But my publishing house’s office building was threatened with bomb scares every few days, we needed to evacuate and wander around Midtown, anxiously awaiting the all-clear. Eventually we stopped believing, we stopped leaving, even while anthrax attacks were invading other media offices in the neighbourhood, killing other people who walked these very same streets, people who could have been me. Everyone jumped every time a truck rumbled by. I never slept through the night, and repeatedly injured myself in the kitchen, knife cuts, burns. At the time, I didn’t recognise PTSD. I just knew my hands and arms were covered in wounds.

This is a terrifying way to live. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s what terrorism is, that’s what it accomplishes
What was coming next? We were all convinced it was something.

In New York, especially down in the Frozen Zone, 11 September lasted a very long time. The terror seemed permanent. It wasn’t.


Fifteen years later, I rarely thought about terrorism anymore; it became something that happened somewhere else. But then I went to one of those somewhere elses: Paris, still reeling from its own series of brutal terror attacks, a city with soldiers everywhere, bomb-sniffing dogs, everything suffused with tension, fear. This felt so familiar, this felt exactly like New York after 9/11, this new category of historical moment: a global metropolis sieged by terror.

A medic tends to a man after the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks (Getty)

Not only did this remind me of 2001, it also reminded me of something that had become a constant part of my recent life: suspense novels, which I’d started writing in 2009. The beautiful foreign setting. The definite sense that something bad was going to happen, but the fundamental uncertainty about what exactly that bad thing would be, to whom, and why, and when. Is it now? What should I do? Should I be acting as if this is a life-and-death situation?

This all defined my experience of 9/11 and its aftermath, the uncertainty and confusion and mistaken assumptions – was that a missile, is the fireball going to engulf me, will the building fall on me, are there really bombs in the office, or anthrax, was that sound an explosion or a car backfiring, why the hell am I bleeding all the time?

This is a terrifying way to live. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s what terrorism is, that’s what it accomplishes.

This is also what a certain type of suspense novel can do.

Ever since 9/11, it had dwelt in the back of my mind that I’d someday write a novel that revolved around a terrorist event. But I didn’t want to write the expected novel, with the expected villains, the expected heroes; I don’t want to write the expected anything. 


That someday was right now. The something that was happening next in Paris wasn’t an explosion, it was something much more mundane: I was going to write that terrorism novel, right now. I took my laptop to a café on the rue de Grenelle, opened a new file, and started work immediately, a story that begins on an autumn Tuesday morning at a quarter to nine, when normal ends.

(Source: Independent)