The Gardener's Part

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Monsieur,

Your letter came by the Rolle carrier on a Tuesday, and I have taken until Sunday to answer it, not because I did not know what to say but because I knew. You ask whether I remember the summer you were ten, and the bean rows below the orangery, and whether it is true, as Monsieur Achard told you years afterwards over a bottle in Lausanne, that I was paid. I remember it. It is true. And since you have done me the honour of asking a plain question, I shall do you the dishonour of a plain answer, which is longer than the question and worse.

My daughter writes this out for me. You will remember her: Suzon, who was nine that year and had a cut on her chin from the wall of the lower terrace. She asks me to say that she has grown out of the cut. She also asks whether I mean to tell all of it, and I have told her yes, and she has put down the pen once already and taken it up again. If the hand changes partway through, you will know why.

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Let me begin where I was, not where you were, because you were in the house and I was not, and the whole matter turns on that.

I was thirty-one and had been gardener to your father four years. I had the cottage by the wash-house, nine écus a quarter, my vegetables, the fallen fruit, and wood. My wife was dead the winter before. I could read, because Pastor Bugnion had taught me with the catechism, and I could write a little, badly, as you see I still cannot. I knew the names of every plant in the kitchen garden in French and in patois, and of a few in Latin, which I had from the labels your grandfather left on the espaliers and which I said aloud to myself when no one was by, the way a boy says the name of a girl.

That spring your father engaged Monsieur Achard. I saw him arrive: a thin man in a brown coat, with a trunk of books strapped behind the chaise, and he did not look at the house first, as visitors did, but at the garden. He stood at the top of the terrace steps for a long time. I thought he was admiring my peas. I was proud of my peas.

He came down to me the next morning and asked whether I could keep a secret from a child. I said I had kept several from my own. He laughed, and I liked him, and that was the first of my faults in this business, though not the worst: I liked him because he had laughed at something I said, and a man who is laughed with by his betters will afterwards do a great deal to be laughed with again.

He explained what he wanted. I did not understand it then; I understand it better now, having had thirty years and the book itself, which I bought from a pedlar at Morges in the year of the Revolution in France, when it was cheap. Your tutor followed a book that the magistrates had burned on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville in Geneva. The book said that a child should learn from things and not from persons. He should not be told that fire burns; he should be let near enough the fire to learn it. He should not be told what is his and what is another's; he should be made to find it out, by planting something and seeing it destroyed by the man whose ground it was. He should never once be given a reason that came from a man's opinion, because every opinion of men carries inside it the poison of comparison, and a child who learns to do right because he is watched will do wrong the moment he is not.

All of which, Monsieur, I now believe, and believed then without knowing it, because it is no more than what every gardener knows about a pear tree. Leave it alone and it grows according to itself. Prune it to the wall and you have fruit for the table and a tree that cannot stand without nails.

But your tutor wanted a thing that the book also wanted and did not quite say. He wanted the things that taught you to be arranged. The fire was to be lit by somebody, at the right distance. The ground was to belong to somebody, and that somebody was to come at the right hour and be angry in the right way. And since he could not be the somebody himself, because then you would learn from a person, he needed a man who would be a thing.

He offered me an écu for the season, over my wages, to be the ground.

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You know what happened, or you know your half of it. I shall tell you mine.

He brought you down in the first week of May and gave you a corner of the lower terrace, by the wall, where I had meant to put the late leeks. He did not give it to you. He stood near it with you and let you see that it was empty and that the soil was good, and he let you ask whether you might plant something, and after a show of doubting he let you. You chose beans, the white Soissons, because Suzon told you they came up fastest. I mention this because it was the only thing in the whole business that nobody arranged. Suzon had been hanging about the wall since you arrived. She wanted to see the boy from the house. She told you about the beans because she was nine and knew something you did not, and that is the oldest pleasure there is.

You planted them too deep. Monsieur Achard did not correct you. I did not correct you, because I had been told not to, and I stood by the wash-house with my arms folded, and I will confess now that it gave me a small, mean happiness to see a banker's son make a gardener's mistake. That is the second fault. Write it down, Suzon. She says she has.

They came up anyway, most of them, some three days late and crooked from pushing through the extra earth. You watered them every morning. You came down before your lessons in your nightshirt with the little brass can that had been your mother's, and Monsieur Achard walked behind you at a distance with his hands behind his back, like a man walking behind a cow he means to sell. By June you had runners on the sticks and flowers on the runners. You called them yours. Nobody had told you they were yours. That, he told me, was the point: a child who has put his labour into ground will believe the ground is his, as the first man did who fenced a field, and he must be shown the error at the very moment he is surest.

On the twenty-third of June, in the early morning, before you came down, I pulled your beans up.

I want to tell you exactly how, because I have told it to myself so many times in the general way that the general way has gone smooth, like a step everyone uses, and I no longer trust it.

It was very early and there was dew. I used the long fork, not my hands, because Monsieur Achard had said the thing should look like what it was, a gardener reclaiming his bed, and a gardener does not pick beans out one by one like a girl. I put the fork in under the first plant and levered, and the whole row came up together, because the roots had knitted, and the sticks came down with them and some of the flowers were crushed against my boot and smelled, the way bean flowers do, a little of honey and a little of something rotten. I turned the earth over. I raked it level. I put in leek seedlings from the frame, twenty of them, in a straight line, and watered them, so that when you came down you would find not a ruin but a neat bed of somebody else's leeks, which was worse, and which was what he had asked for.

Then I went and stood by the wash-house again, and waited for you.

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You came down with the brass can. You stopped. You did not cry at first; you looked, the way a dog looks at a door that was open yesterday. Then you saw me and came to me and asked who had done it, and I said I had.

Here is the speech I gave you. Monsieur Achard and I had made it together in the potting shed the evening before, and I had practised it in the cottage so that Suzon heard and asked what I was saying, and I told her to go to sleep. I said that this was my ground; that I had sown melons in it last year from seed sent from Cavaillon at great cost and had meant to sow them again; that you had come in and planted your beans on my melons without asking leave; that a man's labour was his and so was his land, and I had as much right to my melons as you to your beans, and more, because I was here first.

There had never been any melons. There was no seed from Cavaillon. I have never in my life grown a melon. The ground had been empty since your grandfather's time because the wall shaded it after three o'clock.

You believed me. Why should you not? I was the gardener; I was the ground. Your face changed, and I saw the thing happen in it that the book said would happen, the idea of property entering a child by the wound. You said you were sorry. You said you had not known about the melons. And then Monsieur Achard came forward, exactly on his mark, as if from nowhere, and made the peace: perhaps Daniel would give you a small piece of ground elsewhere, if you asked properly, on condition that you respected his. And I, on my mark, after a show of doubting, agreed.

Now listen, because this is the part Monsieur Achard did not know, and could not have put in his notes, which you tell me he showed you.

When you said you were sorry about the melons, I felt pleasure. Not relief that the scene had gone well; I mean pleasure, of a particular colour, which I have since learned to recognise in myself and in other men and never in a plant. It was this: the son of the house, who would have a tutor and a horse and a seat in the Two Hundred if he chose, who had his mother's brass can, was standing in my wet earth apologising to me for a wrong he had not done. And for that minute the ground was really mine, more mine than my cottage, and I was more than him.

I tell myself sometimes that I am inventing this, that I am making myself blacker to make the confession worth the paper. Suzon says that is exactly what I would say. She is right, and it does not settle it. I can only show you what I see when I look, and I see that.

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You were a good child, Monsieur, and an obedient one, and you did not plant anything for a week. Then you went to Suzon.

I did not know this until July. Nobody arranged it. You and she, it seems, had been talking over the wall since the beans, she on the cottage side and you on the terrace side, and she told you that her father had never grown a melon in his life, because she had been there every summer and would have seen. And you asked her, I suppose, whether her father was a liar, and she said yes, sometimes, when the pastor came about the tithe of hay. Suzon, you are not to cross that out.

So you knew. And here is what you did with it, which is the thing I have never forgotten and the reason I am glad, God forgive me, that you wrote.

You did not go to your tutor. You did not come to me. I think now you were afraid of something you could not have named: that if the melons were a lie, then the anger was a lie, and if the anger was a lie, then someone had wanted you to see it, and you did not know who, and you did not want to know. You were ten. You had learned from things that the world had an order in it, and now you had learned from a person, from a girl of nine with a cut on her chin, that the order had been put there. That was the lesson the book was written to prevent, and the book had delivered it to you by the hand of the man who followed it most faithfully.

What you did instead was go round by the wash-house when I was at the hay, with your pocket full of the beans left over in the paper Suzon had given you in May, which you had kept in your drawer all that while without anyone knowing, and plant it in the strip along the south side of my cottage, where Suzon had a few marigolds. You did not ask my leave. You did not ask anyone's. Suzon kept watch.

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I found them the evening of the eleventh of July. I am sure of the date because it was the day after Monsieur Achard paid me, in the potting shed, with the écu wrapped in a page torn from his notebook, and I had the page still in my waistcoat. The beans were up, a hand high, eight of them. They were crooked again. You had planted them too deep again, because nobody had told you, and you had not learned it from the first time because the first time you had not been allowed to see them through.

I knew at once whose they were. I stood looking at them with the fork in my hand, because I had come round to turn the midden.

I should like to tell you I felt only tenderness. What I felt first was that this was my ground, mine by a better right than the terrace had ever been, the one strip of earth on that whole estate that your father did not own the use of, by my contract; and that the boy from the house had come in without asking and put his beans in it; and that I had in my waistcoat a paper which proved I was paid to know exactly what to do about that. And I lifted the fork.

I want to be accurate. I did not lift it far. I lifted it the way a man lifts his hand to a dog he has struck before, which is less than the first time and more than not at all. And I was not, in that instant, thinking of property, or of the book, or of you. I was thinking that I had done this once for an écu and Monsieur Achard's good opinion and the pleasure of your apology, and that if I did it again for nothing, I would have found out what I was.

Suzon came out of the cottage behind me with the lamp. She said, "Those are his," the way you say the time.

I put the fork back against the wall.

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You will want to know what I did after, and the answer is nothing, and it was the hardest nothing I have ever done. I did not tell Monsieur Achard; he would have wanted to use it, and he would have been right by his book to want it, and I did not want it used. I did not tell you that I knew. I did not water them, because then you would have known I had seen. I did not stake them better, though the sticks Suzon had cut were too short and the runners went over the top by the end of the month and hung down like hair. I did not, God help me, tell you they were too deep.

I let the ground be ground. That is all it is, Monsieur, when men leave it alone: ground that does not know whose it is, and does not care what you planted or why, and will tell you the truth about the depth of a seed whether you are a banker's son or a gardener's daughter. The book said you should learn from things. I had made myself into a thing for an écu and taught you a lie. The only thing I ever taught you that was true, I taught you by standing still.

When the French were in the valley and everyone at the inn was talking about what men are, I always came back to that evening with the fork, and I found that I could not answer from my own case, because my own case is the case of a man who had been made wicked by a very small wage and a very great wish to be thought well of by a person in a brown coat. Take those two things away and what is left? I do not know. A man standing by a wall with a fork, and a girl with a lamp. That is as far down as I can dig.

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Monsieur Achard left at Michaelmas, as you know, for a family in Neuchâtel, and I believe he did well by them. He shook my hand at the gate and said I had been invaluable. I have kept the page from his notebook. It is enclosed. You will see your name on one side, and the date, and the words propriété: première leçon, réussie, and on the other side some calculation about firewood that has nothing to do with anything. I have never been able to throw it away and I do not want it any longer.

Suzon asks me to add that the beans from the cottage strip gave about two pounds, dried, and that she and I ate them in the winter of that year with a piece of bacon from Rolle market. She asks me to add that they were very good. I have told her that is not a confession. She says it is.

She also asks me to say that you were welcome then, and are welcome now, and that the strip along the south wall of the cottage is still there and still gets the sun until five. I have told her that the cottage belongs to your father's heirs, which is to say to you. She says I know perfectly well what she means. I do.

There are leeks in it this year. They are in a straight line. I will pull them up for you if you come, and you may plant what you like, and I will not say one word about the depth.

Your servant, and once your ground,

Daniel Cuénod, gardener written out by his daughter Suzanne

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Iohanne Iacōbō Rousseau per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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