am like no other living man. In this book I have hidden
nothing evil and added nothing good; and I challenge any man to say,
having unveiled his heart with equal sincerity, "I am better than he."

I was born at Geneva in 1712, son of Isaac Rousseau, watchmaker, and of
Susanne, his wife. My birth, the first of my misfortunes, cost my mother
her life, and I came into the world so weakly that I was not expected to
live. My father's sister lavished on me the tenderest care, and he,
disconsolate, loved me with extreme affection.

Like all children, but even more than others, I felt before I thought;
and my consciousness was first awakened by reading stories with my
father. Sometimes we read together until the birds were singing in the
morning light. These tales gave me a most precocious insight into human
passions, and the confused emotions which swept through me brought with
them the queerest and most romantic views of life. But when I was seven
we came to the end of my mother's old stock of romances, and we fell
back on Bossuet, Moliere, Plutarch, Ovid, and the like. Plutarch went
far to cure me of novels; indeed, his "Lives" were the means of forming
that free and republican spirit, intolerant of servitude, which has been
my torment. To my aunt, who knew endless songs, and used to chant them
with a sweet, tiny thread of a voice, I owe my passion for music.

These, then, were my first affections. These formed that heart of mine,
so proud yet so tender; they fashioned that effeminate yet untamable
character, which has ever drifted between weakness and virtue. For I
have been in contradiction with myself, in such a way that abstinence
and fruition, pleasure and wisdom, have escaped me equally.

My father having left Geneva, I remained under the care of my uncle
Bernard, and was placed, with his son of my own age, in the house of M.
Lambercier, protestant minister at Bossey, to learn all the trivialities
that are called education. Here I gained my keen love of country
pleasures, and tasted, with my cousin, the delights of simple
friendship. But a cruel punishment for a fault which I had not
committed, put an end to my childish simplicity, and soon I left Bossey
without regret. There followed two or three years of indolence at
Geneva.

After a brief and luckless trial of a notary's office I was apprenticed
to an engraver, a petty tyrant, whose injustice taught me to lie and to
steal. Restless, dissatisfied, and in perpetu