James Boswell (1740-1795) has sometimes been criticized for being a kind of lackey, and for making a cartoon figure of Dr. Johnson. There is some truth to the charge, which, with the emphasis on some, is a way of saying that there is a line of defense open to those inclined in Boswell's favor. He is after all the author of one of the most enjoyable books ever written: The Life of Johnson, whatever its faults, has been a well of pleasure to readers for now more than 200 years. Then there are his voluminous journals. Where to start? The expurgated pages, of course!
Boswell was in his mid-20s and travelling on the Continent when word reached him that his mother had died back in Edinburgh. He returned home in the company of Therese Le Vasseur, Rousseau's lifetime companion. His entries for the eleven days of the journey from Paris to London are missing from the journal, though a literary executor inserted a slip of paper marked "Reprehensible Passage" at the place where the approximately twelve manuscript pages should have been. Before they were destroyed these pages were read by Colonel Ralph Heyward Isham, whose notes are the principal source for the following Editorial Note in Boswell on the Grand Tour, edited by Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle:
It does not appear that before leaving Paris Boswell had formed any scheme of seducing Therese, and the day of his departure found him tense and harassed by difficulties in getting started, and deeply unhappy over his mother's death. But the intimacy of travel and the proximity in which the pair found themselves at inns at night precipitated an intrigue almost immediately. On the second night out they shared the same bed; Boswell's first attempt, as often with him, was a fiasco. He was deeply humiliated, the grief he was trying to repress came back upon him, and he wept. Therese, with a Frenchwoman's tenderness and sympathy, put her arm around him to console him and laid his hand on her shoulder. His grief and embarrassment waned; as he recorded on another occasion, his powers were excited and he felt himself vigorous. Next day he was very proud of himself, and in the coach he congratulated Therese (who was almost twenty years his senior) on her good fortune in having at last experienced the ardours of a Scotch lover. Therese stunned him by denying that she had great cause for gratitude: "I allow," she said, "that you are a hardy and vigorous lover, but you have no art." Then, with quick perception seeing him cast down, she went on, "I did not mean to hurt you. You are young, you can learn. I myself will give you your first lesson in the art of love."
[Snip.]
He gave some details of her instruction. He must be gentle though ardent; he must not hurry. She asked him, as a man who had travelled much, if he had noticed how many things were achieved by men's hands. He made good technical progress, though he was not wholly persuaded of her right to set up for a teacher; he said she rode him "agitated, like a bad rider galloping downhill." After awhile her lectures bored him, and he brought up the subject of Rousseau, hoping at least to gather a few dicta philosophi for his journal. Therese in her turn found that dull. It was a mistake, he finally reflected, to get involved with an old man's mistress.
The first entry following the excised pages commences: "Wednesday 12 February [1766; Dover]. Yesterday morning had gone to bed very early, and had done it once: thirteen in all." Years later, speaking of himself in the third person in his Tour to the Hebrides, Boswell wrote: "He had all Dr. Johnson's principles, with some degree of relaxation."
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