Book One: Geneva (1712–1728)

I am undertaking an enterprise which has no precedent, and whose execution will have no imitator. I want to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself.

Myself alone. I feel my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exists. If I am not better, at least I am different. Whether nature did well or ill to break the mould in which she cast me, no one can judge until he has read me.

Let the trumpet of the Last Judgement sound when it will; I shall come with this book in my hand to present myself before the sovereign Judge. I shall say aloud: "Here is what I have done, what I have thought, what I was. I have told the good and the bad with the same frankness. I have hidden nothing bad, added nothing good. I have shown myself as I was: contemptible and vile when I was so; good, generous, sublime when I was so. I have unveiled my inmost self as You Yourself have seen it, Eternal Being. Gather round me the countless throng of my fellows: let them hear my confessions, let them groan at my unworthiness, let them blush at my wretchedness. Let each of them in turn uncover his heart at the foot of Your throne with the same sincerity; and then let one of them say, if he dares: I was better than that man."

I was born at Geneva, in 1712, of Isaac Rousseau, citizen, and Suzanne Bernard, citizen. My mother died in giving me birth: I cost my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes. I was born almost dying; they had little hope of saving me. My father never consoled himself for her loss; he thought he saw her again in me, without being able to forget that I had taken her from him; he never embraced me without my feeling, in his sighs, in his convulsive embraces, that a bitter regret was mingled with his caresses. "Jean-Jacques," he would say, "let us talk of your mother." "Well then, father, we are going to cry." And that word alone drew tears from him.

I do not know how I learned to read; I remember only my first readings and their effect on me. My mother had left some novels. My father and I began to read them after supper; first it was a matter of exercising me in reading with amusing books; but soon the interest became so keen that we read by turns without stopping, and spent whole nights at it. We could never leave off until the end of the volume. Sometimes my father, hearing the swallows in the morning, would say, quite ashamed: "Let us go to bed; I am more of a child than you are." When the novels were exhausted, we turned to the library of my mother's father — Plutarch above all, who became my favourite reading. I believed myself a Greek or a Roman; I became the person whose life I was reading. From this came that free and republican spirit, that indomitable and proud character, impatient of the yoke and of servitude, which has tormented me all my life.

My father, after a quarrel with a French officer, had to leave Geneva, rather than submit to an unjust sentence; and I was placed with my cousin in the house of the pastor Lambercier, at Bossey, to learn Latin and all the rubbish that goes with it under the name of education. Two years spent in the village softened a little my Roman harshness, and brought me back to the state of childhood. I loved the country, the Lamberciers, my cousin, everything.

Rousseau here tells of a punishment he received from Mlle Lambercier, the pastor's sister, when he was about eight, and of its lasting effect on his imagination; this passage is not retold here.

In front of the door of the courtyard, on the terrace, M. Lambercier had planted a walnut tree, with great solemnity; and round it a basin had been dug to water it. My cousin and I, wanting a tree of our own, planted a willow cutting a few feet away, and dug a basin for it too; but we had no water. So we dug a little secret channel under the ground, covered with boards and earth, from the walnut's basin to our willow's. The first time the walnut was watered, we saw the water run into our basin, and we jumped for joy — and M. Lambercier, seeing it too, cried "An aqueduct! an aqueduct!", took a pickaxe, and destroyed our work at a blow, crying all the while "An aqueduct!" — and went off laughing. That aqueduct, built by two children of ten, made me prouder than Caesar could have been of his bridge over the Rhine.

One day I was studying alone in the room next to the kitchen. The servant had put Mlle Lambercier's combs to dry on the stove. When she came back for them, the teeth of one were all broken off on one side. Who was to blame? No one but I had entered the room. They questioned me; I denied that I had touched the comb. They did not believe me; they beat me, and I was punished with great severity. I was not guilty. I still declare it, fifty years later, before heaven: I was innocent. That first feeling of violence and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my soul that all the ideas connected with it bring back my first emotion. From that moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness. We stayed at Bossey a few months more; we lived as the first man is represented to us in the earthly paradise, but having ceased to enjoy it.

I was apprenticed, first to a notary, who sent me away as a fool; then to an engraver, a brutal young man named Ducommun, who in a short time tarnished all the brightness of my childhood. I learned under him to covet in silence, to dissemble, to lie, and at last to steal — asparagus from a neighbour's garden, apples from the master's storeroom. I was beaten, and I grew used to it, and stole the more boldly. On Sundays, after service, I went out with my companions beyond the city; and twice I came back too late, to find the gates shut. The second time, the master gave me such a reception that I resolved not to risk a third. The third time came: I was a few hundred paces from the gate when I saw the bridge being raised. In a first transport of grief I threw myself on the glacis and bit the earth. My companions laughed and went to sleep in the suburbs. I swore never to return to my master. The next day, at the hour of the opening of the gates, I said good-bye to my companions, and set out into the world. I was sixteen.