IN the last chapter I discussed how the composers Mondonville, Couperin, Rameau, and others used pantomime in their musical compositions. In this chapter I turn to another composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was also a music theorist and a philosopher. Rameau and Rousseau often appear side-by-side in studies of eighteenth-century French music, not only because Rousseau composed Les Fêtes de Ramire, but also because they debated on many important musical topics – most famously the theoretical relationships between harmony and melody. Yet, despite copious studies on Rameau's dances and Rousseau's pantomimes, Rousseau's thoughts on dance are not fully understood. Like Rameau, Rousseau was interested in pantomime as a type of dance that could expand the expressive range of dance. Like Rameau, Rousseau thought about la belle danse in the civilizing process. Yet, unlike Rameau, who used pantomime to explore the idea of artists’ freedom that could be illustrated in performance, Rousseau used pantomime to explore spectators’ moral liberty when they responded to a stimulating performance. In other words, while Rameau focused on text and its effect on performance, Rousseau, fully aware of the significance of his text, emphasized the issue of reception of an effective performance at the theater. In his intermède called Le Devin du village of 1753, which was a great operatic phenomenon in late eighteenth-century France, Rousseau found a way for spectators to recognize their moral liberty through watching, interpreting, and sharing the content of pantomime among themselves. This chapter is about how he made this discovery.

Le Devin du village consists of three characters: a village couple called Colin and Colette, and a fortune teller called the Soothsayer (Le Devin). We will begin our discussion with fortune telling, known in the eighteenth century as “soothsaying.”

What did soothsaying mean in the Enlightenment? It might be unsurprising that soothsaying was rationalized in the Enlightenment as a useful skill (similar to what we now call “counselling,” “informed prediction,” or “educated guess”) rather than a mystical practice but, surprisingly, Rousseau retained some mystique surrounding this term. In the Encyclopédie Louis de Jaucourt identified two types of fortune tellers – prophets and soothsayers – and defined them as folks good at making predictions about the future. Although both types could predict events that were yet to take place, Jaucourt explained that none of them in fact possessed any real supernatural power.