The King's Pension
1752 · Rousseau, who copies sheet music for a living, the day before a royal pension is to be offered
His little opera has been performed in front of the King and the King has not stopped humming it. The court is delighted. Word comes that he is to be presented tomorrow, and that a royal pension will be offered: a permanent income, for life, for a man who currently earns his living copying sheet music by the page.
He is forty. He has been poor his entire adult life. The woman he lives with has no security of any kind, and neither does he, and the copying is ruining his eyes.
He has also just published, and become famous for, the argument that civilization corrupts people, that institutions and patronage and the whole apparatus of a court are precisely what turns human beings into performing versions of themselves.
If he takes it, nothing he writes afterwards will ever be read without the pension in the room. If he refuses it, he keeps the only thing that makes anyone listen to him, and goes back to copying music at ten sous a page for the next twenty years.
The presentation is at noon.
Take the pension
Refuse itOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Rousseau did not go to the presentation. He gave several reasons over the years (his health, his bladder, his horror of court ritual), and the one he settled on in the Confessions was independence: a pensioner cannot say what he had said. He spent the rest of his life poor, and produced within a decade the Discourse on Inequality, Julie, Émile and The Social Contract. Two of those were publicly burned and he was a fugitive with warrants out in both Paris and Geneva. He also, in those same years, left all five of his children at the Paris foundling hospital and then wrote Europe's most influential book on raising a child.
The philosophers weigh in
Take it"I took the money, advised a monster, and wrote on virtue in the evenings, and men have sneered at me for it since. They have also read the essays. Take the pension and write better."
Refuse"Alexander offered me anything I wanted and I asked him to stop blocking the sun. The trick is not refusing the money. The trick is genuinely not wanting it, and almost nobody manages the second part."