To thank Ralph Leigh for an honourable mention in a note of his edition of the Correspondance complète de Rousseau was to risk the benign sarcasm of a man who knew the full measure of the recognition due to him. ‘What do you mean, honour?’, he could growl at so slight an expression of gratitude. ‘It’s immortality’—thus bestowed on the still living through a power Leigh shared only with the Académie française. Modesty was perhaps not his most conspicuous trait, but greater sign of it would in no way have enhanced his academic achievement, which was to set unprecedented and undreamt of standards of scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century studies. Of course Rousseau’s own immortality had been well secured even without the assistance of Leigh, all the more because above every other major figure of the period he had been in so many respects an outsider, remote from it, both of the Enlightenment and against it, an sich aber nicht für sich. And yet there are certain crucial respects in which this work may be said to reshape as well as reaffirm that reputation, and to demand a reassessment of the true nature and scope of Rousseau’s meaning and influence.
For one thing, thanks to Leigh, he managed to sustain a correspondence, and not just win immortality, beyond the grave. The Leigh edition ends not with the death of Rousseau in 1778 but with that of Thérèse Levasseur in 1801 and with the advent of the age of Napoleon (R. A. Leigh (ed.), Correspondance complete de Jean Jacques Rousseau [hereafter CC] (Geneva, Banbury and Oxford, 1965–98), no. 8382–84 and 8386). The last nine volumes are in many respects the most important of all, for the material they embrace, and the interpretive commentaries around it, comprise an indispensable archive for the assessment of Rousseauism at the end of the ancien régime. They deal with Rousseau’s literary remains, and with the complex affairs of the trustees of his estate in their negotiations for a complete edition, including, of course, both parts of the Confessions; with commentators speculating on the circumstances of his death, and with others reflecting on his character as they visit his shrine at Ermenonville. They deal with all the authorized and known pirate editions of his works—several uncovered or identified by Leigh himself—and with the ambitions and negotiations of their publishers in the crucial decade between Rousseau’s death and the outbreak of the French Revolution, upon which so much scholarship about his putative influence has previously foundered for want of this testimony; and they deal with the celebrations of his memory in the popular press and with the festivals in his honour in both Paris and Geneva, in the course of the French Revolution. These volumes, every one of them undertaken after Leigh’s retirement from his chair of French at Cambridge, form a monumental repository and chronicle in their own right, the touchstone for all future research on Rousseau’s revolutionary influence—in fact, henceforth the point de départ, from a bibliographical perspective, of some of the most central questions to do with the connection between the French Revolution and the Enlightenment.
Second, the textual notes and variants which Leigh presents, not only for Rousseau’s own letters but for each of the more than fifteen thousand manuscripts which are transcribed in the Correspondance,1 form an extraordinary collection—one of the most important ever assembled—for the study of French literature and literary style in the period. The famous letter to Voltaire of 18 August 1756, the so-called ‘Lettre sur la providence’, is presented in full in two different versions covering nearly fifty pages (CC, no. 424 and 424 bis), with comprehensive annotation for all the variants of the seven surviving manuscripts (of an original thirteen), whose relation to one another requires a genealogical table, duly provided by Leigh, to explain it, plus almost one hundred explications de texte, some of them of essay length. The surviving drafts of Rousseau’s extraordinary letter to Saint-Germain of 26 February 1770 are likewise presented in two versions, with collations for all the other manuscript variants, over fifty-four pages. The remarkable and even illustrated pilgrimage to Ermenonville recorded by Brizard and Anacharsis Cloots in 1783 (CC, no. 7843) receives similar treatment and annotation, and at sixty-three pages may be the longest document of the whole Correspondance, and the most complex in the editorial problems it posed. Rousseau, as Leigh often remarks, was the Flaubert of the eighteenth century—the beauty, metre and cadences of his prose refined and tempered out of the torments of their composition. We all recall the anguish described in the Confessions (OC, vol. 1, pp. 113 and 114 [C 113 and 114]): ‘Mes idées s’arrangent dans ma tête avec la plus incroyable difficulté’ [‘Ideas take shape in my head with the most incredible difficulty’], a problem which Rousseau explains made it desperately painful for him to write. ‘Mes manuscrits, raturés, barbouillés, mêlés, indéchiffrables attestent la peine qu’ils m’ont coûtée. Il n’y en a pas un qu’il ne m’ait fallu transcrire quatre ou cinq fois avant de le donner à la presse. . . . Je n’écris point de lettres sur les moindres sujets qui ne me coûtent des heures de fatigue’. [‘My blotted, scratched, confused, illegible manuscripts attest to the pain they have cost me. There is not one that I have not had to rewrite four or five times before sending it to the printer. . . . I never write a letter on the most trivial subject that does not cost me hours of weariness’]. Leigh’s transcriptions of the corpus of Rousseau’s letters remind us, on the one hand, of how much his whole life was a kind of literary voyage, and of how so many of the most sublime passages in his prose are to be found in the letters themselves. On the other hand, all the variants transcribed by Leigh provide a unique insight into Rousseau’s style of composition, the at once laborious and exhilarating manner in which reverie is transformed into art. Leigh was Jean-Jacques’s stenographer and recording angel for much the largest surviving archive—and it is very large indeed—of his manuscript material. The textual notes and variants stand to the letters themselves as they stand collectively to the Confessions. They are the most fundamental source from which Rousseau’s autobiography was shaped, in the immediacy of their composition more authentic in many ways than the assembled reflections Rousseau produced later to lend them greater coherence and plausibility. They map the draft stages of the gestation of his ideas, the instantaneous evocation of his dreams. When historians like Bronislaw Baczko wistfully remark about such dreams, ‘Combien il est rare de relever leur trace dans les archives!’ [‘How rare it is to find a trace of them in the archives!’],2 Leigh’s edition of the Correspondance de Rousseau points the way.
Third, and no less important, are the thousands of notes explicatives that Leigh appended to the eighty-four hundred letters and seven hundred annexed documents (the distinction is dropped after Rousseau’s death) which comprise this collection. From national, municipal and military archives, and from public records offices in France, Switzerland, Italy, England, Scotland, Germany and other countries, he compiled the biographies of at least five thousand correspondents or persons mentioned in exchanges and their families—many of them utterly obscure figures who sought Rousseau’s advice in domestic matters, or who turned to him for political guidance, or who merely wrote to him in the not always vain hope that a meeting, even his signature, might one day lend credence to the fabrications of a friendship around which their own literary fortunes could be made. Some of the sycophants or uncritical admirers whose faintly ridiculous machinations Leigh recounts are well-known—Boswell, for instance, or Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, or Madame de la Tour de Franqueville. But Rousseau was lord to many flies, and practically everyone who scampered after him, or who sought the crumbs from his table, or who even had occasion to fear those crumbs, is identified in this work: the mysterious republican comtesse de Wartensleben (CC, no. 5426), writing on behalf of the wayward son of a friend, who inspires in Rousseau’s reply (CC, no. 5450) one of the finest pages of eighteenth-century French prose; or the whole family of Nicolas-Eloy Thévenin (CC, no. 6438), who falsely accused Rousseau of failing to pay a debt; or the entire clan of the surgeon Laubel (CC, no. 6305 and app. 569), who conducted the autopsy on the concierge of the château de Trye, whom Rousseau, in one of his darkest hours, imagined that he was suspected of having poisoned. Almost everyone who passed through his life here emerges from the shadows of obscurity; hardly any stone in the path of biographical scholarship is left unturned. Leigh, as sensitive in his fashion as was Rousseau to the enthusiasms of friendship and the anxieties of betrayal, comes in his commentaries to rekindle the suspicions which Jean-Jacques nurtured and, at the same time, by documenting the remarks of the persons who inspired them, takes a dispassionate stance of a kind that was never open to Rousseau himself. In an appendix relating all the possible motives and circumstances which surrounded Voltaire’s cryptic and artful offer of refuge to Rousseau when he fell foul of the authorities in France, Leigh concludes, on Rousseau’s behalf, ‘Ce n’est pas là une de ces pressantes invitations qui incitent à faire ses valises sur le champ’ (CC, app. 271) [‘This was not one of those pressing invitations that prompts one to pack one’s bags on the spot’]. Through these immensely voluminous notes, all the diversity of Rousseau’s life and times comes to be illuminated, not only through his own eyes, as we find in the Confessions, but through the eyes of his contemporaries as well. Especially for the later volumes, where the notes are often unconnected with the texts above them, it is Leigh’s commentary rather than the original documents which most excite attention. I know of no work in eighteenth-century studies with more magisterial annotation. The index alone, when it appears, should prove a compulsory guide, for other scholars, not only to the biography of Rousseau, but to the whole eighteenth-century world he inhabited. And let us remember the vast scale of this enterprise. Forty-nine volumes of text have appeared thus far, together with another of critical apparatus just out3—that is to say, over twenty thousand pages and probably in excess of thirteen million words in all, of which, on my crude reckoning, more than three million were drafted by Leigh himself, rather more than by Rousseau, as it happens, leaving aside the fact that the ten million words of which he is not the author are for the most part Leigh’s own transcriptions from the manuscripts. Three million words—not one of them, incidentally, in his native tongue—would comprise about thirty volumes in their own right, if the prefaces, notes and commentaries had been so assembled. Leigh was nearly forty when he began to contemplate a new edition of the Rousseau correspondence. The first volume, and hence his first book-length publication, appeared when he was fifty, an indulgence for the rigours of scholarship that no university or research council would be likely to extend today. He died at the age of seventy-two, having seen through the press more than half a million words each year in the interval, aside from his other publications, his teaching and his family responsibilities in the course of his wife’s long illness, which was to cost her her life in 1972. The Correspondance complète de Rousseau is an utterly formidable achievement.
Of course, like all major publishing ventures, this finished product, massive though it is, constitutes only part of the story. In every such enterprise there are off-stage preparations and plays within the play, or banks within the bank, whose accounts never come to be disclosed. There are negotiations with librarians and archivists, many of them immensely helpful, but others displaying little more than the irritation of indolent holders of sinecures whose repose has been disturbed by an agitated foreigner. There are dealings with descendants, or associates of descendants, of Rousseau’s correspondents, known to hold certain documents but determined that their publication should not compromise the family name; and Leigh had more than once to wait for a literary inheritance to pass into more pliant hands, publishing a letter out of turn, with a fulsome expression of gratitude to its new possessor, or to the old one he had worn down with repeated entreaties, as if the document were only newly discovered. There are others who continually deny all knowledge of such documents, contrary to the available evidence, sometimes hinting that they hope to enhance the value of the scribblings they own by excluding them from the Correspondance, or alternatively intimating that disclosure of their whereabouts would contradict the depositions they or their parents had earlier made to the tax inspectorate. Leigh suffered greatly from what he called ‘the voluminous secondary correspondence’, ‘the complex and intricate negotiations with archivists, librarians, collectors, families, dealers and auctioneers. Along with the problems of bulk’, he adds, ‘come [those] generated by the time-scale of the operation. Over a period of some thirty years . . . you discover that the paper of your original notes has frayed and crumbled, that the ink has yellowed and faded, that your early scribble is undecipherable, that your eyes have changed focus or have become blurred and dim. . . . you find that you can no longer work fourteen hours a day. The never-ending journeys to remote sources become tiring and tiresome. You can no longer run with the same élan after the retreating bus, train or plane; and those enormous folio works of reference, produced in and for a more heroic age, become impossible to lift, or else slip from your enfeebled grasp’.4 ‘And then, alas,’ he adds, ‘there is the question of finance. The poor might find it easier to enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the rich can afford to edit an extensive correspondence. The great wealthy foundations . . . are reluctant to help a scholar working on his own. They rush to the assistance of institutions, or impressive-looking teams, which, more often than not, exist only on paper, and whose work tends not infrequently to grind to a halt, while the funds allocated to it dribble away into overheads and superstructure. These great foundations . . . are afraid [the scholar working alone] will spend their money on riotous living’. Here, therefore, are Leigh’s ‘three golden rules for editing large-scale correspondences: (1) Be rich, and, if possible, influential too; (2) Be young and vigorous, and make up your mind never to grow old; (3) Always start at least a hundred years before you actually do’.5
Not least because newly discovered Rousseau letters are becoming scarce, and because only a few dozen were uncovered in the course of Leigh’s endeavours, there are some persons, even today, who wonder why this work had to be done at all. Was there not a wholly serviceable edition already available, the Correspondance générale de Rousseau, prepared by Théophile Dufour and completed by Pierre-Paul Plan, in twenty volumes between 1924 and 1934? This was, and by some scholars is still, held to be a quite sufficiently authoritative text, published ‘avec le concours de l’Institut de France’, prepared by the ‘ancien directeur des Archives et de la Bibliothèque de Genève’, ‘collationnée sur les originaux’, as was heralded on the title-page to each volume—a monumental work, widely acclaimed, upon which numerous literary prizes were lavished when it appeared. Lack of space prevents me from commenting at length here on the merits of that confection, which Leigh once described as ‘one of the most extraordinary hoaxes ever perpetrated on the world of learning’.6 Suffice it to say that anyone who inspects the Dufour archive in Geneva7 can see plainly that, by and large, he did not transcribe Rousseau’s letters from the original manuscripts, but rather transcribed the variants between the manuscripts and published texts, and between the texts of different editions, by way of annotating the printed versions of Rousseau’s correspondence. Dufour was particularly well-acquainted with the numerous editions of Rousseau’s Oeuvres which had appeared in the 1820s, and he cut out pages from two copies of tomes 17–20 of the second Lequien edition, dating from 1826, and pasted them to blank sheets.8 These tomes of the correspondence of Rousseau themselves reproduce the five volumes of letters included in the second Musset-Pathay edition of Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes dating from 1823 to 1826, in turn a transcription from the Moultou-Du Peyrou Geneva edition of 1782. In certain cases Dufour worked instead from the two volumes of Rousseau inédits appended to the Musset-Pathay edition in 1825. For other letters he just dissected later editions—among them the Hachette of 1865 and thereafter—in the same fashion, or turned to an assortment of works in which newly discovered documents had appeared, including even the Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau.9 For letters addressed to Rousseau, he relied largely upon the Streckeisen-Moultou collection of 1865, every now and again severely censuring his predecessor for errors of transcription, including deliberate suppressions and negligent omissions, but largely reproducing the same texts, incorporating other suppressions and omissions.10 As a consequence of its duplication of such earlier printed versions, the Correspondance générale de Rousseau is peppered with misattributions of dates and persons, with replies which predate the request, with letters sent from places Rousseau had not yet visited, or which he had left several years before his letter was apparently posted.
Part of the explanation of the literary farrago which constitutes this work has to do with the fact that its putative editor had already died before it came to be compiled under his name. Dufour was one of those all too familiar figures in the world of scholarship who devote the whole of their lives to the uncritical and unsystematic assemblage of data so diffuse and so disorganized that it cannot be made fit for publication. He was, in his day, if I may so put it, the Lord Acton of Geneva—in that he drew together so much material (indeed, he made almost equally voluminous jottings on Calvinism and the history of Geneva), while seeing so little through the press. He began to accumulate his archive on the correspondence of Rousseau as early as 1864, at the age of twenty, and, when he died in 1922, he left a mass of papers but no instructions of any kind as to what purpose it might serve. As Plan himself remarks disarmingly in his preface, ‘Dufour n’a laissé aucune indication précise sur ses intentions; son activité prodigieuse s’est limitée à la chasse des matériaux, et il ne s’est pas expliqué sur les manières dont il entendait les mettre en oeuvre’.11 Yet, thanks to Plan, Dufour is credited with having collated the original manuscripts. Thanks, moreover, to Plan’s own testimony, the Correspondance générale de Rousseau incorporates what Dufour apparently never intended to include—that is, the letters addressed to, as well as those sent by, Rousseau. But, true to his practice, Plan seems to have cared little more for the manuscript collation of letters that Rousseau received than for those that he drafted. Like Dufour before him, Plan reproduced letters from their first, or what he believed to be their best, publication, thus recapitulating the errors of previous editors and passing off the liberties they took with their texts as authentic transcriptions. Who can tell from the Dufour-Plan edition of Rousseau’s correspondence that the letters of Leonhard Usteri, for instance, were reconstructed by their first editor into classically proportioned French prose from the strange circumlocutions, ungrammatical prolixities and occasional lapses into pidgin-French which Usteri had actually conveyed to Rousseau?
None of this need have occurred; nor, for that matter, should Dufour himself be blamed, for there is no reason to suppose that he ever envisaged producing, or contributing to, a new edition of Rousseau’s correspondence. In so far as he had any ambition to see his desultory compilations published, he merely hoped to complete an index which would tabulate all the mistakes of transcription in each of the previously printed editions—a preoccupation with misprints and typographical errors clearly evident in his similarly unfinished and posthumously published Recherches bibliographiques sur les oeuvres imprimées de Rousseau (2 vols., Paris, 1925). In 1922 this forlorn wish of a nearly eighty-year-old scholar was conveyed to Alexis François, the Secretary of the Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva, who had just edited Rousseau’s correspondence with Coindet (having earlier edited his correspondence with Tissot) and who, on behalf of the Société Rousseau, was now about to assume responsibility for a new ‘definitive’ edition of the whole Rousseau correspondence. François wished to incorporate the work of Dufour as part of a collaborative venture, and he showed as little interest in a projected catalogue of editorial mistranscriptions as, apparently, Dufour displayed for his endeavours. Some months after their meeting, Dufour died, and François, together with his appointed publishers, Hachette, now hoped they might somehow take stock of Dufour’s collection and annotations. His aim, he reports, was to acknowledge the provenance of such notes in his edition, but when in 1923 Dufour’s daughter, Hélène Pittard-Dufour, speaking for her family, stipulated that the name of her father must appear on the work’s title-page and covers, François refused. How could he pass on responsibility for what he expected would be his own life’s work (he was then in his early forties) to a defunct scholar whose collection of papers he had not yet even inspected, and whose reliability had still to be established? Eventually, the Société Rousseau came up with another proposal which might better flatter the memory of Dufour and thereby satisfy his daughter’s sense of honour, embracing the formula ‘avec la participation des papiers Th. Dufour’ on the work’s title-page, thus meeting her original condition. In the meanwhile, however, the Dufour family had commissioned a detailed inventory of his Rousseau documents which had, on grounds never explained, established that they were in sufficiently coherent order to permit publication. In the spring of 1923, accordingly, Mme. Pittard-Dufour entered into negotiations with an alternative publisher, Armand Colin, and another editor, Plan, was found, who readily acceded to the demand that the name of Dufour should appear on every title-page.12
Plan was a journalist and not undistinguished scholar who had worked on Rousseau and Malesherbes and on Rousseau’s reputation in the eighteenth century, not to mention the catalogue de l’Enfer, that is, the collection of prohibited books at the Bibliothèque nationale. Eventually, he was to be associated with the Bibliothèque publique et universitaire de Genève. But, for most of his life, he was, as Bernard Gagnebin once put it, ‘un boulevardier qui vivait dans les cafés’.13 So incensed were the archivists of the Rousseau collections in Geneva and Neuchâtel at this outcome of the projected new edition of the correspondence of Rousseau (indeed, for a time the Société Rousseau entertained the notion of a competing second edition) that, when Plan sought access in Geneva to material from the Bibliothèque de Neuchâtel, his request was turned down. It was in this fashion that a collection of papers really meant to inform a catalogue of printers’ errors and publishers’ variants came to assume the identity of a very different work, conceived by another editor, whose own aspirations were cut short by his initial disinclination to pay what was judged proper tribute for the right to cull a painstakingly, if somewhat pointlessly, assembled archive. Thus was immortality purchased at the price of scholarship by a daughter for her father.14 The Dufour-Plan edition of the Correspondance générale de Rousseau was, at least from the point of view of Rousseau studies, a publishing fiasco which from its inception cried out for remedy. In deceiving its readers, Plan had actually done a disservice to the reputation of Dufour.
After the debacle of its own long-cherished plans to take part in a ‘definitive’ edition of the correspondence of Rousseau, the Société Rousseau might well have looked askance at a projected new edition, begun some thirty years after that of Dufour-Plan, this time by a little-known Englishman from Cambridge. Foreign scholars have perhaps been welcomed with more conspicuous cordiality in Switzerland than in France, and by the 1950s Theodore Besterman, the first and largely self-appointed Director of the Musée Voltaire in Geneva, had already embarked on his own edition of Voltaire’s Correspondence. But relations between Besterman and the indigenous world of Swiss scholarship often proved stormy and eventually broke down in international scandal, and Besterman himself, after a hasty evacuation to Oxfordshire where he set up a new Voltaire Foundation, came to portray the city of Geneva as ‘a corrupt and xenophobic municipality’.15 In the meanwhile, and not least as a measure of his own appreciation of the extent of French and Swiss support for his endeavours on their behalf, he had elected to annotate the Voltaire correspondence in English. When it transpired that Besterman was also to be Leigh’s publisher, and that the editors of the two most substantial projects of our time in Swiss eighteenth-century studies—indeed, in French Enlightenment studies generally—were thus outsiders, there was bound to be unease, not only in Swiss academic circles but in France as well. Who on the Continent could have bargained for the real allegiance and first principles of each man? Who anywhere dared guess that the latest editor of Rousseau’s correspondence, together with his publisher, who was himself the editor of Voltaire’s correspondence, would each assume the personality of his subject and in the labyrinthine course of their dealings would come to resuscitate, in spirit, the greatest quarrel of eighteenth-century French literature? The publication of the Leigh edition of the Correspondance complète de Rousseau was to rekindle both the mutual admiration and shared mistrust of the Enlightenment’s most formidable adversaries—on the one hand, of the braggart and mountebank, addicted to luxury, whom Rousseau condemned for debasing the upright morals of his Genevan compatriots, and, on the other, of the insufferable lunatic whose self-righteous unworldliness Voltaire decried as a betrayal of the practical ideals of his own cosmopolitan republic of letters.
The two men first met through the pages of the Modern Language Review in the summer of 1954, Besterman in his capacity as editor of what was intended to be the definitive edition of Voltaire’s correspondence, Leigh as the reviewer of the first three volumes. It was an inauspicious encounter, since Leigh’s review is a devastating though not uncharacteristic blast, altogether a tour de force, at Besterman’s expense. While praising Besterman as a ‘literary sleuth of the first order’16 whose work would prove ‘an important “instrument de travail” ’ that would make all other editions seem ‘antediluvian’, he remarked, nevertheless, that ‘this edition is not so good as it might be’ and then proceeded to amplify that comment with a comprehensive catalogue of its mistranscriptions, ‘dubious readings’, improbable chronologies and other blunders of an editor whom he portrayed as ‘gossipy, importunate, otiose, and unsystematic’.17 In their first direct exchange (RAL to ThB, 3 August 1954), Leigh sought to soothe his wounded prey by observing that though ‘my criticisms must inevitably seem to you severe . . . for all of them I have given chapter and verse. In fact, at the very last moment, I deleted from my typescript a list of some forty odd misprints etc. [my italics], because I did not wish my review to appear one-sided’.
Besterman, who had already made Voltaire’s home and bed at Les Délices his own, was outraged by such cavilling criticism from an upstart reviewer, which had somewhat soured the launch of what he planned to be the greatest monument of literary scholarship of our age. ‘I do not disapprove of your review because of its criticisms’, he replied in his own first letter to Leigh (8 August 1954). ‘Far from it, I welcome constructive criticism. (For that matter, I have in my time written much more severe reviews). What I object to is the tone of your comments, their obvious animus, and your lack of a humanistic scale of values’.18 In the meanwhile, he had taken the precaution of writing to the assistant editor of the journal, informing her that ‘no further volumes of Voltaire’s correspondence will be sent for review by Dr. Leigh’ (ThB to Winifred Husbands at University College London, 22 July 1954). A copy of that letter was passed on to Leigh, whose own approach to Besterman—on this occasion more in the spirit of Voltaire himself than his editor had been able to muster—was prompted by it. ‘Being both editor and publisher’, he wrote (3 August 1954), ‘you are in a unique position to impose sanctions, and you have taken full advantage of it. . . . Your action raises an important issue of principle. . . . Whatever you intend, the effect of your decision can only be the suppression of criticism. . . . I cannot bring myself to believe that you really wish to purchase immunity from criticism in this way . . . nor that Voltaire himself would have approved of this infraction of a principle he so persistently defended; the principle of free speech’.
Besterman was most certainly wounded by Leigh’s review, but he was nevertheless impressed by the all too conspicuous scholarship which had informed it, and he persevered in sending the Voltaire correspondence, as the volumes appeared, to the Modern Language Review, where Leigh continued in much the same vein as before, with Besterman, honourably swallowing his pride, now correcting his text in the light of Leigh’s and other testimony. By 1956 (19 April) he could acknowledge his gratitude, always in his own fashion: ‘Let me thank you . . . for all the trouble you have taken . . . with this labour of what I cannot exactly call love’. ‘You must spend a great part of your time on my edition! . . . If you are not careful you will finish by becoming quite urbane’ (ThB to RAL, 8 April 1957). The volumes of the Voltaire Correspondence began to pass direct from the editor to the reviewer, now more by way of appreciation for services rendered than as review copies. Besterman’s wrath had, to his credit, been short-lived. He protested vigorously that Leigh was unfair to claim that he invariably defends Voltaire (ThB to RAL, 19 April 1956). ‘I am undoubtedly for Voltaire’, he remarked, ‘but not blindly or uncritically’, to which Leigh’s response (23 April 1956) was that he had merely implied that Besterman refrains ‘from criticising Voltaire, where criticism would be appropriate, given that you are going to comment editorially on such matters’. This exchange between the two men is striking, for it was to inform the temper and anxiety that underlay all their dealings with respect to the publication of the Rousseau correspondence, as well as that of the Voltaire correspondence, over a period of twenty years. Not only was Besterman plainly ‘for Voltaire’, but, in adopting the entrepreneurial cunning of his master in the great cause of humanity and reason, he was moved, throughout his career as publishing patron and Godfather of Enlightenment studies as a whole, to see the inhabitants of his own world as if through Voltaire’s eyes. ‘You get more like J. J. R. every day’, he remarked to Leigh (1 May 1973), nineteen years after their first exchange, as if it were at last plain that the vitriol and arsenic which Voltaire had detected in Rousseau’s veins had managed to contaminate his scribe.
Leigh, for his part, while he grumbled that Besterman was ‘too fond of making generalisations about [his] character’ (6 March 1968), did not resist the imputation to him of Rousseau’s qualities; he may even have warmed to the portrayal of that resemblance drawn by a man who, on Voltaire’s behalf, found Jean-Jacques himself so tiresome. And he undoubtedly did display certain Rousseauist attributes in his dealings with Besterman—mistrustful as he often was of his publisher’s real motives and inclined to suspect a sinister scheme behind a thoughtless remark, or, on the other hand, inattentive to the costs and risks of producing, amending and distributing publications of unknown length and equally doubtful circulation. In pushing back whole frontiers of knowledge with only a scalpel, Leigh took little notice of the business of cultivating the new fields he cleared. Like Johnson in his celebrated letter to Lord Chesterfield of 7 February 1755, he would plainly have preferred ‘not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received . . . unwilling that the public should consider [him] as owing that to a patron, which Providence has enabled [him] to do for [himself]’. In Besterman, nevertheless, he had met, perhaps without sufficiently recognizing his good fortune, a man of exceptionally rare gifts in the world of publishing, to whom Enlightenment studies over the past thirty years owe much of their efflorescence: an entrepreneur with a true love of scholarship. It is hard to imagine another publisher in any country consenting to produce the Correspondance complète de Rousseau in the form which it took. For all their conflicts of temperament, the collaboration of Leigh with Besterman made possible the appearance in print of the most remarkable work ever produced in eighteenth-century studies.
The first suggestion that Leigh should embark on a new edition of the correspondence of Rousseau actually came from Besterman, in the autumn of 1956, although Leigh had long before formed the view, in the course of his research on Rousseau’s writings and influence, not only that such a work was needed, but even that he ought to undertake it himself.19 On Besterman’s invitation, he began that task, without any clear brief or notion of its prospective length or style—even without a contract, until, after several volumes had already appeared, a formal agreement was drawn up in 1968. Over the whole period of their dealings from the early 1960s until the death of Besterman in 1976, they exchanged recriminations, now not about the Voltaire correspondence, but that of Rousseau. What would the work be called? Leigh, anxious to ensure that it would supersede the Dufour-Plan edition, had resolved to correct Dufour’s errors in his notes, and proposed the same title as before: the Correspondance générale de Rousseau. Besterman reluctantly yielded to Leigh’s insistence on such notes but demanded that the title be changed, as it was, to the Correspondance complète de Rousseau (ThB to RAL, 18 October 1961, and RAL to ThB, 24 October 1961). Leigh was initially determined to include a dedication to his wife, the pianist Edith Kern. Besterman suppressed it, sparing Leigh, as he put it, ‘all sorts of genevoiseries’ that would have been called forth by an editor’s dedication of a great man’s works (ThB to RAL, 30 November 1964). Although the matter of copyright had never been discussed and was to remain unsettled for several years even after first publication, volume one actually appeared, in January 1965, bearing the unauthorized copyright of Theodore Besterman. Leigh exploded, and thereafter Besterman left out all reference to it, until the printing of volume seven in 1969, the first to be properly covered by an editor’s contract (including a royalty), which was then duly published under the copyright, once again, of ‘Theodore Besterman’. In 1965, after ten years of mutual reproach and remonstrance, tempered by intermittent flashes of cordiality, Besterman sighed wearily to Leigh, ‘I do wish that you would get rid of that chip on your shoulder. I hoped that when the first volume was safely published you would feel more equanimity, but really you are getting more and more peevish’ (ThB to RAL, 31 May 1965). On other occasions it was his own exasperation with Leigh, rather than the thunder of Leigh’s annoyance with him, which stirred Besterman most. If ever a history of their turbulent relationship comes to be written, I think it should bear, as its title, the opening line of a letter Besterman sent to Leigh on 14 November 1960: ‘Pistols for two and coffee for one!’ [later published as Robert Wokler, ‘Pistols for Two and Coffee for One: Rekindling Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s Quarrel in the Footnotes’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 362 (1998): 1–10].
Throughout the eleven years of publication of the Correspondance complète de Rousseau before Besterman’s death, the quarrel between its editor and publisher had one principal manifest source, with certain unexpressed ramifications: this was the length of the work, and especially the density of its footnotes, which Leigh so often revised in proof, and hence the sheer cost of producing each volume. When in 1961 Besterman asked Leigh how long the whole enterprise would be, Leigh replied, ‘5400’ letters, ‘but experience shows it would be wiser to allow for up to 6000’ (4 July 1961). When completed, it in fact came to embrace more than 9000 documents in all—not a number, I believe, which Leigh ever secretly had in mind, but one which, like Topsy, just grew. And those notes!, Besterman complained on receiving the typescript of the first volume, even while congratulating Leigh ‘on a remarkable piece of work’. They are not notes at all, but rather ‘essays in the guise of notes’ which ‘go far beyond the scope of an edition of correspondence’ (ThB to RAL, 12 October 1964). Leigh had tried to prepare Besterman for the shock. ‘You should not . . . be unduly alarmed if the annotation of the first volume in particular seems to be rather heavy’, he had forewarned (RAL to ThB, 3 July 1964). ‘The earliest letters are the most difficult . . . and . . . a good many things need to be said at the beginning once and for all’. These at once cautionary and reassuring remarks were to be utterly contradicted by the evidence of the later volumes. The notes are as long throughout, and, not least by virtue of their length, form the very essence of this masterpiece. They terrified Besterman, who had already had more than one occasion (mainly in the preparation and enlargement of the microfilm of the Neuchâtel papers) to balk at Leigh’s extravagance. ‘I never contemplated anything on this scale’, he scolded ruefully (15 August 1959), ‘and I do feel you should not have committed me to so enormous [an expense] without consulting me’. The cost of publishing the Rousseau correspondence, particularly the early volumes, for which there were few subscribers, was very substantial indeed, and Leigh, until brusquely confronted by his publisher’s demand for a subsidy, appeared blissfully unaware of the nature of Besterman’s own misgivings at the extent of his investment in his work. ‘Especially with Dufour-Plan still in print’, Besterman reminded him just before the first volume appeared (24 September 1964), ‘this publication is going to be very difficult to sell’. To excite interest, he sent out seventy-five hundred prospectuses, more than for Voltaire’s Correspondence.
In June 1965, after a decade of preparation, the whole venture nearly came to stillborn grief, when Besterman suggested that as Leigh was now pursuing a grant for some editorial assistance with UNESCO, and as he had now himself just received what he called ‘the fatal invoice’ from the printers—32,000 Swiss francs, equivalent to more than £2500—the time had finally come to settle accounts. ‘I am afraid’, he remarked, rather too casually, ‘I must now set out what you owe me. First of all frs 1803.40 for excess author’s corrections. . . . Then there is frs 1476.50, being half the cost of the two colour plates. Finally frs 320 . . . for the six extra copies, and frs 85 for the offprints. This makes a total of 3684.90, which I should be glad to receive as soon as possible’ (ThB to RAL, 4 June 1965).20 Confronted by such news, Leigh burst forth in exasperated rage. ‘I am at my wits’ end about that bill’, he complained bitterly (8 June 1965). ‘Before I start to correct the proofs of the second volume . . . I need a clearer understanding of what corrections are permissible and what percentage of free corrections I am allowed . . . I simply cannot afford to go on after all the sacrifices I have made!’ Besterman’s retort was penned the next day. ‘To say that I am staggered by your . . . letter . . . is to put it mildly’, he sniped. ‘You continue to behave as though I have a bottomless purse and an unlimited willingness to dip into it. Neither of these things is true. Your first volume has been so expensive to produce that even if the entire edition is sold I shall be substantially out of pocket. In these circumstances it is difficult for me to take patiently the offhand way in which you dismiss your debt, and I must make it perfectly clear to you that I am not prepared to go on unless you keep your word’. These letters drove Leigh to despair, with the product of ten years’ labour and his projected whole life’s work thus placed in jeopardy. ‘It is not I who think you have “a bottomless purse” etc. etc.’, he replied plaintively, ‘but you who think this of me’ (10 June 1965). In embarrassment he approached his College (Trinity, Cambridge) Council and then, to Besterman, rehearsed the full history of their relationship and the reasons why it was quite impossible for him, even through his College, or the University, to subsidize the publication of his own work: ‘This is not Leeds or Newcastle’, he lamented on 11 June 1965 (whatever can he have had in mind?). ‘If you had said to me in 1956 when you first approached me that you could not publish without a subsidy, I should have promptly replied “nothing doing”. I have enough agony trying to raise money to finance essential research, and I must repeat . . . that if there is no manuscript, there can be no publication, and all the subsidies in the world are useless if there is no work to subsidise’.
Leigh now seemed genuinely at the brink of total collapse. Besterman, for all his admiration of Leigh’s scholarship, was clearly not the sort of devoted, dutiful and, so far as it had been in his power, beneficent publisher that Rousseau had found in Marc-Michel Rey. And yet Besterman’s reply to these anguished cries reveals a man perhaps more feckless than callous, unable to fathom the extent of Leigh’s desolation: ‘Are you not making heavy weather of this publication subsidy business?’, he sighed (15 June 1965), with a tone of newly cultivated equanimity.21 ‘When I first suggested publishing the Rousseau correspondence I was quite prepared to face a loss, and I have been quite prepared for it ever since, even though costs have so enormously increased in the meanwhile. Nevertheless I always hoped that some subsidy might be forthcoming, and surely I cannot be blamed for trying to get some money if any were going. Yet you talk as though I were committing some dreadful crime!’ He might have added Johnson’s remark that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’, but of course Leigh, not a businessman or publisher but merely one of the finest scholars of his age, was, indeed, just such a blockhead. Eventually, the crisis passed. Besterman’s purse proved deeper than he cared to admit, and, in due course, as he had always hoped, albeit privately, the Correspondance complète de Rousseau began to make money for its publisher. Ultimately, it was to draw a much needed and greatly welcomed royalty for its editor as well. The number of its subscribers was, in Besterman’s own lifetime, actually to surpass the number of purchasers of his Correspondence of Voltaire.
For Besterman himself, this burgeoning popularity of Leigh’s work was a mixed blessing. While replenishing his purse, it diminished his control over, and his main professed reason for objecting to, Leigh’s editorial excesses. Above all, it progressively undermined his own stature as Voltaire’s editor and amanuensis. By the sheer excellence of the Rousseau correspondence annotation, and the unparalleled command of his subject which Leigh displayed in it, his work manifestly upstaged and outshone Besterman’s own endeavours on behalf of le roi soleil of the Enlightenment—a feat all the more galling because readers of Voltaire’s exchange of letters with Rousseau would henceforth turn to the more authoritative and, from his point of view, inevitably deeply biased, version produced by Rousseau’s shadow, and put into bold print, on exceptionally fine paper, by Voltaire’s ghost. These were not matters which could be considered in Besterman’s own exchanges with Leigh, but they must have fuelled a growing anxiety which a man of such profound self-esteem could not have harboured when he first lent his encouragement to Leigh. What was he to do? In 1965, when the last of the 107 volumes of his edition of the correspondence of Voltaire was published, there appeared, under his auspices, the first volume of another eighteenth-century correspondence which set editorial standards that might seem to threaten his own work with obsolescence. In 1968 was begun the fresh publication of an updated version of Voltaire’s Correspondence, edited once more by Besterman, this time described as ‘definitive’, to the exasperation of librarians and book collectors everywhere, who had only just paid their last instalment on the first set. No doubt there were sound academic, and perhaps even some compelling financial, reasons for embarking on a new edition so quickly on the heels of its precursor. Helpful corrections to Besterman’s mistakes had been supplied from many quarters, none more assiduous than Leigh, whose contribution had been acknowledged by his appointment, in 1956, to the advisory committee of Voltaire’s Correspondence.22 In the meanwhile, a great many new Voltaire documents had been discovered or at last located, not least by virtue of the publication of Besterman’s original edition, and a whole archive had even been released from the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad, thanks to Besterman’s forthright request, made direct to Nikita Khrushchev (one premier to another, as it were), ‘to give orders that a microfilm should be . . . sent to me’, in the interests of ‘international cultural cooperation’ (ThB to NK, The Kremlin, Moscow, 2 January 1958).23 All these and other factors no doubt underlay Besterman’s decision to produce the Voltaire correspondence a second time.24 But to the extent that the editorial revisions of the definitive version also point to the inadequacies of the first, Leigh’s Correspondance complète de Rousseau, interpolated between the two sets of Voltaire, may help to explain why Besterman himself came to judge his initial effort an inadequate false start. It would be one of the most ironical legacies of a great eighteenth-century quarrel if the fulsome annotation of Rousseau’s correspondence by his editor were to have provoked Voltaire’s editor, on his behalf, to say everything a second time.
Allowing that the tensions of their fraught relationship did serve to drive Besterman to wholesale repetition, they inspired Leigh, instead—always a man of more poetic temperament—to translate them into blank verse. In 1967, while he was in the United States, but at a not more than usually tempestuous moment of an always stormy and, for the world of scholarship, utterly invigorating collaboration, he addressed the following lines to Besterman:
To this delightfully abrasive commentary, if I may purloin the last line from an essay of which Leigh was always proud, ‘it would be lacking in charity to add a single word’.25