The Confessions

Contents

1. I Book I 1 h 41 min 21

   Rousseau announces an unprecedented project, to show one man exactly as he was, and tells his life from his birth in Geneva in 1712 to his flight in 1728. His mother dies at his birth; he reads romances and Plutarch with his watchmaker father, who is driven into exile after a quarrel. At Bossey, boarding with the pastor Lambercier, he discovers a lasting sexual disposition and suffers his first injustice over a broken comb. Apprenticed to a brutal engraver, he learns to lie and steal, retreats into reading and fantasy, and, shut out of the city one night, decides not to return.

2. II Book II 1 h 49 min 11

   Rousseau crosses into Savoy, where the curé of Confignon sends him to Mme de Warens at Annecy; he is captivated at first sight. She and the local clergy send him on to the convert's hospice at Turin, where he disputes with the priests before abjuring Protestantism, then finds himself on the street with twenty francs. He works for Mme Basile, a shopkeeper whose husband throws him out, and becomes footman to the dying Countess of Vercellis. In her house he steals a ribbon and blames the young cook Marion, a lie that he says haunted him for forty years.

3. III Book III 1 h 47 min 12

   Out of work in Turin, Rousseau learns morality from the Abbé Gaime, one model for the Savoyard Vicar, and is taken into the noble house of Solar, where his explanation of the family motto wins him favour and Latin lessons. He throws the chance away to tramp home with a friend and is taken in again by Mme de Warens, whom he calls Mamma. Judged dull, he is sent to the seminary, then to the music-master Le Maître. He analyses his slow mind and quick feeling, helps Le Maître flee to Lyon, deserts him there, and returns to find Mme de Warens gone to Paris.

4. IV Book IV 1 h 49 min 13

   Back at Annecy in 1730, Rousseau finds Mme de Warens gone to Paris. He idles with the musician Venture, spends a chaste day at Thônes with two young ladies, and escorts the maid Merceret to Fribourg. At Lausanne he poses as a Parisian music master and gives a ludicrous concert; he then serves a Greek archimandrite as interpreter until the French ambassador at Solothurn takes him in. Paris disappoints. Walking back, he meets a peasant hiding food from the tax collectors, sleeps rough at Lyons, and rejoins Mme de Warens at Chambéry, who finds him a clerk’s post in the royal land survey.

5. V Book V 2 h 13 min 17

   At Chambéry (1731–36) Rousseau works in the land survey, then leaves it to teach music to the town’s young ladies. He discovers that Mme de Warens’s steward Claude Anet is her lover, and is himself initiated into a household of three, which he describes as incestuous and joyless. He sketches her character and the sophistry that misled her, mourns Anet’s death in 1734, and takes over her failing finances amid a swarm of projectors. He studies Rameau, meets Gauffecourt and Conzié, reads Voltaire, witnesses Geneva’s civil strife of 1737, nearly dies in a chemical accident, falls ill, and moves with her to Les Charmettes.

6. VI Book VI 2 h 7 min 13

   The short happiness of Les Charmettes. A sudden attack leaves Rousseau with lifelong noises in the ears and the expectation of early death, turning him to religion, shaped by Mme de Warens’s merciful creed, and to a self-taught course of philosophy, mathematics and Latin, alongside gardening and bees. Of age, he claims his mother’s inheritance at Geneva. Travelling to consult the Montpellier doctors as the Jacobite “Dudding”, he has an affair with Mme de Larnage, but returns to find himself replaced by Wintzenried. After a failed year as tutor in the Mably household at Lyons, he leaves for Paris with a numerical musical notation.

7. VII Book VII 2 h 13 min 20

   Opening Part Two, written in 1769–70 amid fears of a conspiracy, Rousseau goes to Paris in 1742 with a scheme for writing music in figures, which the Academy of Sciences politely rejects. Patronage among the salon hostesses, above all Mme Dupin, leads to a post as secretary to the comte de Montaigu, ambassador at Venice (1743–44). He describes doing the incompetent ambassador’s work, quarrelling over fees and rank, and leaving unpaid; then Venetian music, the courtesan Zulietta, and a girl he and a friend bought from her mother.

8. VII Book VII (continued) 1 h 9 min 17

   Back in Paris, Rousseau cannot obtain justice against Montaigu because he is not French, and dates his anger at civil institutions from this. He befriends the Basque Altuna, begins his life with Thérèse Levasseur, and has his opera reworked and slighted at court amid Rameau’s hostility. He becomes secretary to Mme Dupin and Francueil, and on the advice of a table of officers and financiers sends his first two children to the Foundling Hospital. He meets Mme d’Épinay, joins Diderot, Condillac and d’Alembert, writes for the Encyclopédie, and grieves at Diderot’s imprisonment in 1749.

9. VIII Book VIII 2 h 23 min 29

   On the road to visit Diderot at Vincennes in 1749 Rousseau reads the Dijon prize question and conceives the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. Its success, and an illness, lead him to give up a cashier’s post and live by copying music. He defends abandoning his children, as five in all, by appeal to Plato. The Village Soothsayer triumphs at court in 1752; he refuses the king’s pension, joins the quarrel over Italian music, and writes the Discourse on Inequality. In 1754 he regains Genevan citizenship, then accepts Mme d’Épinay’s Hermitage.

10. IX Book IX 1 h 42 min 23

    In April 1756 Rousseau moves with Thérèse and her mother to the Hermitage, a cottage Mme d’Épinay has prepared for him near Montmorency, meaning to live by copying music. He reviews his projects, among them the Institutions politiques and an edition of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, soon abandoned. He traces the strains in his household and with the Holbach circle, recalls the “reform” of his austere years, and describes how solitude and frustrated longing turned into the reveries from which Julie was born. Along the way come the letter to Voltaire on the Lisbon earthquake and a winter of contented writing.

11. IX Book IX (continued) 2 h 9 min 20

    In the spring of 1757 Mme d’Houdetot, Saint-Lambert’s mistress, visits the Hermitage and Rousseau falls in love with her, the one passion of his life by his account, kept within the bounds she set. Rumours reach Saint-Lambert; Rousseau blames Mme d’Épinay and sends her furious letters. Quarrels with Diderot over the line “only the wicked man is alone” and with Grimm follow. When Rousseau refuses to accompany Mme d’Épinay to Geneva, Diderot rebukes him, Grimm breaks with him, and her letter from Geneva amounts to dismissal. On 15 December 1757 he leaves for Mont-Louis at Montmorency, sending Mme Levasseur back to Paris.

12. X Book X 2 h 24 min 28

    From the winter of 1758 to the autumn of 1760 at Mont-Louis, Montmorency. Ill and convinced that Grimm, Madame d’Épinay and the Holbach circle are blackening his name, Rousseau writes the Letter to d’Alembert against a theatre in Geneva and publicly breaks with Diderot in its preface. He finishes Julie, extracts The Social Contract from his abandoned Institutions politiques, refuses a paid post and resolves to write his memoirs. The Maréchal and Maréchale de Luxembourg take him up, lodge him in their Little Castle, where he writes Emile’s fifth book, and bring him into court society, while blunders begin to cool the Maréchale. Quarrels with Palissot and Voltaire follow.

13. XI Book XI 1 h 56 min 20

    From the publication of Julie in January 1761 to Rousseau’s flight in June 1762. The novel’s triumph, especially among women, contrasts with his waning favour with Madame de Luxembourg, whose failed search for one of his abandoned children he records. He sells Emile and The Social Contract, suffers through the slow printing of Emile, imagines a Jesuit plot, and writes four autobiographical letters to Malesherbes. After publication the Parlement of Paris condemns Emile; warned at night by the Prince of Conti, Rousseau leaves Montmorency on 9 June, parts from Thérèse and the Maréchal, composes The Levite of Ephraim on the road and kisses the soil of Bernese Switzerland.

14. XII Book XII 2 h 0 min 31

    Book XII opens the “work of darkness”: the years from 1762 in which Rousseau believes a hidden conspiracy directed his misfortunes. Condemned in Paris and Geneva and expelled from Bern's territory, he settles at Môtiers in Prussian Neuchâtel under the protection of the Earl Marischal, George Keith. He takes communion, adopts Armenian dress, begins gathering materials for his memoirs, renounces his Genevan citizenship and enters the Genevan quarrel with the Letters from the Mountain. He loses Luxembourg, Mme de Warens and Keith, meets Du Peyrou, Hume's invitation arrives through Mme de Verdelin, and the pastor Montmollin turns the villagers against him.

15. XII Book XII (continued) 1 h 1 min 13

    After his house at Môtiers is stoned in September 1765, Rousseau retreats to the island of St. Peter in the Lake of Bienne, settles his income and papers with Du Peyrou, and enjoys six weeks of idleness, botany and reverie on the lake. He recounts the Corsican invitation to act as legislator and his doubts about it. Bern then orders him out within twenty-four hours; a brief stay at Bienne collapses, and he leaves for Berlin but ends in England. A postscript records a reading of the memoirs in 1771 that ended in silence.