How to Create the Perfect Wife (25 page)

Growing increasingly introverted as he delved into his own past and psyche, Rousseau had become disillusioned with his published works. He now argued that anyone who understood
The Social Contract
was cleverer than he was and said he regretted ever writing
Émile
because it had stirred up too much trouble. Even so, the opportunity to meet one of the products of his celebrated educational doctrine proved too hard to resist.

Climbing the steep, dark stairs to the fifth floor, Day and Edgeworth called on Rousseau toward the end of August and were admitted into his attic apartment. As thin as ever from his frugal diet, Rousseau still retained the piercing black eyes that could transfix friends and enemies alike. His rooms were furnished sparely with two single beds, a table and a few chairs. Hanging from the ceiling were several cages containing canaries. Inviting nature in to share his city retreat, Rousseau fed crumbs to sparrows, which clustered daily on his windowsill. One visitor who was struck by this picture of the frail philosopher surrounded by birds in his city eyrie, likened Rousseau to “an inhabitant of the air.” Dodging the bird cages as they crowded into the cramped apartment, Day and Edgeworth ushered Dick forward to meet his maker.

Rousseau had, of course, exchanged letters with the Prince and Princess of Wurtemberg on bringing up baby Sophie and remonstrated with Guillaume-François Roussel over his five feral daughters, but he had never before come face-to-face with the fruit of his teachings—his fictional Émile made flesh. Fixing Dick with his beady black eyes, Rousseau was fascinated. He invited the boy to accompany him on his customary morning walk around Paris, in a poignant reconstruction of the educational excursions by the imaginary teacher and pupil in his book, leaving Edgeworth and Day to wait nervously behind. Tramping the Parisian parks and streets for the next two hours, Rousseau quizzed the boy closely on his understanding and outlook.

Brought up to speak his mind in the manner of the fictional Émile, Dick answered Rousseau’s questions with neither fear nor tact, proudly flaunting his knowledge of science and history and imperiously insisting
on the superiority of all things English. If Rousseau pointed out a handsome horse or stylish carriage or even a smart pair of shoe buckles, Dick insisted that they must be English. Dick’s patriotism was hardly surprising. Devoted to his Anglo-Irish father, the brilliant inventor of carriages, who was friends with Boulton, the world’s most popular maker of silverware, Dick naturally assumed that all the best coaches and buckles must be English.

Rousseau returned to his visitors with a grave face. He was impressed by the boy’s intelligence and knowledge, he reported, but appalled by Dick’s outspoken jingoism. Rousseau warned Edgeworth sternly, “I remark in your son a propensity to party prejudice, which will be a great blemish in his character.” Already harboring deep misgivings about Dick’s liberal education, Edgeworth was mortified at the verdict. Day kept strategically silent about the disappointing outcome of his own educational experiment.

Moving rapidly on, the party headed south to spend the winter in Lyon, where, Edgeworth noted, “excellent masters of all sorts were to be found.” On arrival Day set about hiring suitable tutors in fencing, dancing and horsemanship, and Edgeworth devoted himself to overcoming his infatuation for Honora in the only way he knew how: by throwing himself into work. Offering his services to the city authorities for free, Edgeworth took charge of an ambitious engineering project aimed at altering the direction of the mighty Rhône in order to reclaim land. For the next two years Edgeworth would attempt to suppress his passion for Honora by battling to divert the surging river from its natural course. Day and Dick, meanwhile, began their respective lessons.

Since his father was busy directing teams of French laborers all day, Dick was left in the hands of his English tutor and assorted local teachers who were supervised by Day. Although Day’s efforts at educating Sabrina had failed so dismally, he would always be regarded as an oracle on bringing up children by Edgeworth and other friends. Finding himself trapped in a schoolroom with a stack of Latin primers for hours on end after four years of glorious liberty and indulgence, Dick rebelled furiously. Quickwitted but implacably stubborn, he flung his books aside and treated his English tutor with contempt. When Dick and his tutor both took French lessons from a native teacher, Dick quickly mastered conversational French
while his tutor stumbled and floundered over the grammar. Gleeful at his superiority, Dick now refused to learn Latin altogether and would not listen to his tutor or anyone else.

His father despaired over his wayward son. “It was difficult to urge him to any thing that did not suit his fancy, and more difficult to restrain him from what he wished to follow,” Edgeworth confessed in bafflement. Finally Edgeworth concluded that his Rousseau experiment had utterly failed—just like Day’s—although in truth it had succeeded only too well. Having been encouraged from an early age to run wild and please himself, to endure extreme hardship and fear nothing, Dick had inevitably grown up fiercely independent and unwilling to bow to authority. Now that he found himself handed over by his father to a variety of strangers and a pile of books in a foreign country, it was only natural that he should rebel. The little boy who had stood at his father’s elbow while he created marvelous inventions and accompanied him on madcap road trips to Ireland and France had grown up in his father’s image: bold, fearless, determined—and fascinated by mechanics. Poor Dick simply wanted to stay at his father’s side as he conjured ingenious bridges and cranes on the banks of the Rhône, not to be shut in a classroom with his fumbling tutor and a scowling Day.

Reproaching himself for ever being “dazzled by the eloquence of Rousseau,” Edgeworth was now convinced that the Rousseau system was founded on “mistaken principles.” Physically, the system had transformed Dick into a fine, strong, stoical boy, but in character, Dick was obstinate and wild. Was it nature or nurture? Edgeworth was convinced it was the latter. “In short, he was self-willed, from a spirit of independence, which had been inculcated by his early education,” he wrote. He would later issue a stark warning to other parents not to follow Rousseau’s advice, and he would devote himself to devising a more practical program of education. Edgeworth blamed himself for neglecting Dick in favor of his work after their arrival in France, but still he could not tear himself away from his great engineering project. Finally he resolved to abandon the educational experiment—and Dick.

Dismissing the various tutors, Edgeworth placed Dick in a Catholic seminary near Lyon. Attracted to the school for its discipline, order and
neatness—in total contrast to the liberal education he had previously espoused—Edgeworth solemnly instructed the father to make no attempts to convert Dick to Catholicism. Although Edgeworth visited from time to time to check on Dick’s progress, effectively he had given up on his son for good. For Dick, accustomed to unbounded freedom and liberal home schooling by his beloved father, the change was miserable indeed. Just like Sabrina, packed off to boarding school in Sutton Coldfield after her progressive education had supposedly failed, Dick was reduced to waiting and watching at windows for the familiar figure he missed.

Meanwhile, lessons were proving equally challenging for Day. While Edgeworth dirtied his clothes and his hands on the muddy banks of the Rhône, Day devoted up to eight hours a day attempting to polish his manners, refine his deportment and improve his wardrobe sense. Straining and sweating, Day tried to coax his limbs into unnatural positions under the instructions of the city’s best teachers of fencing, dancing and dressage. Humiliated and bad-tempered, he stood for hours at a time with his legs clamped between two wooden boards in an effort to straighten his gait or with his torso screwed into a frame designed to push back his shoulders.

Apart from the equestrian coaching, which suited his ideas of classical manhood, Day detested every minute of his French education. One acquaintance later said that Day “despised the French for their effeminacy and affectation” but a delicate Englishman he regarded as “doubly contemptible.” Yet for the sake of his new fiancée, he forced himself to learn the latest dance steps, to thrust and parry with the small sword and to visit tailors, barbers and wig-makers. Filled with bitterness and self-loathing, he practiced his newly acquired skills in genteel manners and polite conversation on members of the French aristocracy at card parties and salons.

A bemused Edgeworth, perhaps recalling the torments that Day had inflicted on Sabrina, watched in amazement as his friend suffered “every species of torture.” He wrote: “It was astonishing to behold the energy, with which he persevered in these pursuits. ... I could not help pitying my philosophical friend, pent in durance vile for hours together, and his feet in the stocks, a book in his hand, and contempt in his heart.” Little by little, inch by painful inch, Day’s training bore fruit. In letters brimming with cynicism and self-mockery, he sent progress reports to Anna Seward
in Lichfield. Slipping back easily into her favorite role as go-between, she passed on details of Day’s gradual transformation to his bride-to-be.

By November his education was well under way. Writing from Lyon, he complained sardonically of “the fatigue of deciding the Embroidery of my new Coat” and declared “I am grown the politest creature imaginable.” His letter ended with a mock proclamation forbidding any residents of Lichfield from referring to him in the future as a “philosopher.” He had persuaded several of his newfound French friends to sign the letter testifying that “Monsieur Day, Gentilhomme Anglais” was “every thing to be admir’d, esteem’d, & lov’d.”

By December his transformation was nearing completion. In a letter heavy with sarcasm, Day told Seward that he had given up philosophy altogether and whatever intellectual faculties he had once possessed were now all “melted down” as he pursued his goal of becoming a gentleman. “I am a lac’d coat, a bag, a sword, and nothing else,” he wrote. “I am become a Type, a parable, a Symbol. Eyes have I which see nothing but Absurdity, ears which hear nothing but nonsense, a Mind which thinks not.” Thanks to his lessons he could now “speak French very prettily” and had become “what a Gentleman should be.”

Day was fully aware of the irony of allowing himself to be molded into an idealized creature, just as Pygmalion had sculpted Galatea—and just as he had tried to change Sabrina. He told Seward that he would define the ideal gentleman “so exactly, that he shall seem to live and breath before you.” His recipe for this concoction followed:

Imprimis, let him have birth, Riches, & Education Enough to make him value himself, and despise the rest of the world. Let him have learning enough, to be able to ridicule religion, principle, & humanity, & to spell out a Billet-doux, or even to write one himself, if his footman is out of the way. Let him modernize the celebrated antient maxim, of know thyself, let him know his own Accomplishments and be very vain of them. Let him have from nature, Insolence, Frivolity, Unfeelingness; from Education, the Politeness of the world, which is affectation, the Gallantry, of the world which is Hypocrisy; from his dancing master grimace; from his Travels Impertinence; & from his Taylor fine Cloaths upon credit. Thus adorn’d, with all of nature & all of art, hang the Constellation up on high, & the world shall worship him, whatever hemisphere he chuses to enlighten: his own Sex shall envy him; & the Ladies shall adore him.

Yet for all his efforts, Day seemed almost to have forgotten the purpose of his travails. In response to a note written in another, anonymous, hand in a corner of Seward’s last letter—which Day evidently took to be an inquiry from Elizabeth Sneyd as to his future intentions—he replied: “I have no schemes; I am too much convinc’d of the uncertainty of human affairs to have any certain Expectation of the future.” Far from having no plans, however, Day proceeded to reel off a list of exotic locations—Naples, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and even St. Helena—which he proposed to visit in an extended Grand Tour over the next three years. He was perhaps toying with Elizabeth’s emotions, goading her even into telling him to stop the ridiculous charade. “Tell me Miss Seward have I made you cry?” he demanded and declared that he could not bear causing “a moment’s Sorrow to those lovely Eyes!” although it was no doubt Elizabeth’s large brown eyes he pictured filling with tears.

By the end of 1771, Day’s metamorphosis was all but complete—and his mortification absolute. He brushed off invitations to join the New Year’s Eve revels at a masked ball thrown for “the Quality of Lyons” and sat down instead to write Seward a masterpiece of self-parody. In a rambling, almost incoherent letter that veered from melancholia to mania—he may have been drunk—Day argued that to a man of the world friendship was a “stale Pretext, by which two fools cheat themselves or two knaves each other.” Virtue, he wrote, was a “Masque to hide an ugly Face.” He was now so skilled in hypocrisy, he said, that he could prove Frenchwomen were in a state of innocence that made them “perfectly indifferent whether their conversation is dirty, or clean, chaste, or obscure, whether they are dress’d or naked, whether they sleep with their Husbands, or their Gallants.”

Day told Seward that he believed “my Education” would be finished when he could conceal any last remaining opinion of common sense or honesty and could “praise a woman’s Sentiments when they shock me; admire them when they disgust me, and say tender Things to her when I
hate her.” Most of these, he admitted, “I can do already,” but his transformation would be complete, he wrote, when he attended a masked ball and danced with “The Shepherdess in the Blue Dress & dirty Gloves.” He ended his letter the following day, January 1, 1772, with a New Year’s resolution to attend that evening’s ball—and with a bizarre postscript inviting Honora Sneyd to meet him in Lyon. He was perhaps so drunk or befuddled that he transposed Honora’s name for Elizabeth’s. Yet despite his transformation, the self-imposed torture continued into the New Year.