ch's "Lives," Nani's
"History of Venice," Ovid's "Metamorphoses," "La Bruyere,"
Fontenelle's "Worlds," his "Dialogues of the Dead," and a few
volumes of Moliere, were transported into my father's shop; and I
read them to him every day during his work. For this employment I
acquired a rare, and, for my age, perhaps unprecedented, taste.
Plutarch especially became my favorite reading. The pleasure which
I found in incessantly reperusing him, cured me in some measure of
the romance madness; and I soon came to prefer Agesilaus, Brutus,
and Aristides, to Orondates, Artemenes, and Juba. From these
interesting studies, joined to the conversations to which they gave
rise with my father, resulted that free, republican spirit, that
haughty and untamable character, fretful of restraint or
subjection, which has tormented me my life long, and that in
situations the least suitable for giving it play. Incessantly
occupied with Rome and Athens, living, so to speak, with their
great men, born myself the citizen of a republic [Geneva], the son
of a father with whom patriotism was the ruling passion, I caught
the flame from him--I imagined myself a Greek or a Roman, and
became the personage whose life I was reading.

On such food of reading and of reverie, young Rousseau's imagination and
sentiment battened, while his reason and his practical sense starved and
died within him. Unconsciously thus in part was formed the dreamer of
the "Emile" and of "The Social Contract." Another glimpse of the
home-life--if home-life such experience can be called--of this
half-orphan, homeless Genevan boy:--

I had a brother, my elder by seven years.... He fell into the ways
of debauchery, even before he was old enough to be really a
libertine.... I remember once when my father was chastising him
severely and in anger, that I impetuously threw myself between
them, clasping him tightly. I thus covered him with my body,
receiving the blows that were aimed at him; and I held out so
persistently in this position, that whether softened by my cries
and tears, or fearing that I should get the worst of it, my father
was forced to forgive him. In the end my brother turned out so bad
that he ran away and disappeared altogether.

It is pathetic--Rousseau's attempted contrast following, between the
paternal neglect of his