Reveries of the Solitary Walker
Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire
Le jeudi 24 octobre 1776, je suivis après dîner les boulevarts jusqu’à la rue du Chemin-Vert, par laquelle je gagnois les hauteurs de Ménilmontant…
On Thursday 24 October 1776, after dinner, I followed the boulevards as far as the rue du Chemin-Vert, by which I reached the heights of Ménilmontant…
The walk
The book is made of ten walks, which Rousseau called promenades. In the second he dates a real one: out along the boulevards, up to the heights of Ménilmontant, then by footpaths through vineyards and meadows to Charonne, and back by another way.
He spent the afternoon looking at plants. He found two he rarely saw around Paris, Picris hieracioides and Bupleurum falcatum, then a rarer one, Cerastium aquaticum, which went into his herbarium. The grape harvest had ended a few days before.
At about six, as he came down from Ménilmontant, the people ahead of him stepped aside and a Great Dane, running ahead of a carriage, came straight at him. He meant to jump so the dog would pass under him. He remembered neither the blow nor the fall, and came to in the arms of strangers when it was almost night.
He did not finish the tenth walk. He died in 1778.
The line
“puis je fis un détour pour revenir par les mêmes prairies en prenant un autre chemin”
In English: then I made a detour, to come back through the same meadows by another path.
Out along the boulevards, a wavering crossing of the vine rows, one wide loop that comes back by another path, and then a sharp break where the dog knocked him down.