The Confessions

by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  It was on 9 April 1756 that I left Paris never to live in a town again; for I do not count as residence a few short stays that I have made, in London, Paris, and other cities, but always on my way through or against my will. Mme d’Épinay came to fetch the three of us in her carriage. Her farmer came and took charge of my modest luggage, and I was installed that same day. I found my little retreat arranged and furnished simply, but neatly and even with taste. The hand which had attended to the furnishing conferred an inestimable value on it in my eyes. I found it delightful to be the guest of my friend, in a house of my own choice that she had built expressly for me.

  Although it was cold and there was still some snow lying, the earth was beginning to sprout; there were violets and primroses to be seen, the buds of the trees were beginning to break, and the very night of my arrival was marked by the first nightingale’s song, which we heard almost at my window, in a wood adjoining the house. Waking after a light sleep, I forgot my change of home and imagined myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when suddenly that warbling made me start, and I cried in my delight: ‘At last all my wishes are fulfilled.’ My first thought was to surrender myself to the influence of the rural objects around me. Instead of beginning to plan my new abode, I began to plan my walks, and there was not a path, a plantation, a wood, or any corner around my house that I had not visited before next day. The more closely I examined this charming retreat, the more I felt that it was made for me. The spot, which was not wild but solitary, transported me in mind to the ends of the earth. It possessed those striking beauties that are hardly ever to be found in the neighbourhood of cities; and never, if one were suddenly put down there, could one have supposed oneself only a dozen miles from Paris.

  After revelling for some days in my rural enchantment I thought of arranging my papers and regulating my occupations. I set aside my mornings, as I had always done, for copying, and my afternoons for walks, on which I would take my little notebook and my pencil. For never having been able to write or think at my ease except in the open air, I was not tempted to alter my methods. I reckoned therefore that the forest of Montmorency, which was almost at my door, would henceforth be my study. I had several works already begun, and I passed them in review. I was fairly fertile in ideas, but in the bustle of the town production had hitherto gone slowly. I counted on displaying a little more application once I had less to distract me. I think that I fulfilled this expectation fairly well. For, considering that I was often ill, often at La Chevrette, at Épinay, at Eaubonne, at the Château of Montmorency, often beset at home by the idle and curious and always occupied for half the day at my copying, anyone who will reckon up and take into account all that I produced during the six years that I spent at the Hermitage and at Montmorency will conclude, I am sure, that if I wasted any time during that period, it was certainly not out of idleness.

  Of the various works that I had on the stocks there was one on which I had long meditated and to which I was more attracted than to the others. To it I was anxious to devote the whole of my life, for it would, in my opinion, put the seal on my reputation. This was my Political Institutions. It was thirteen or fourteen years since I had conceived the original idea for it, at the time when I was in Venice and had some opportunity of observing the defects in that Republic’s highly vaunted constitution. Since then my ideas had been greatly broadened by my study of the history of morals. I had seen that everything is rooted in politics and that, whatever might be attempted, no people would ever be other than the nature of their government made them. So the great question of the best possible government seemed to me to reduce itself to this: ‘What is the nature of the government best fitted to create the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the wisest, and, in fact, the best people, taking the word “best” in its highest sense?’ I believed that I saw a close relationship between that question and another, very nearly though not quite the same: ‘What is the government which by its nature always adheres closest to the law?’ From which one comes to: ‘What is the law?’ and to a chain of questions of that magnitude. I saw that all this was leading me to some great truths which would make for the happiness of the human race, but above all for that of my native land, whose ideas of law and liberty had not seemed to me, on my recent journey, as just or as clear-cut as I could have wished; and I considered this indirect method of teaching them these truths the best calculated to spare the pride of the citizens and to secure me forgiveness for having been able to see a little farther in this respect than they.

  Although I had been engaged in this work for five or six years, I had not got very far with it. Books of this kind require reflection, leisure, and quiet. Besides, I was working at it, as they say, behind closed doors, and I had preferred not to communicate my plan to anyone, even to Diderot. I was afraid that it would seem too bold for the age and the country in which I was writing, and that my friends’ alarm might hinder me in the execution.* I did not yet know whether it would be finished in time or in such a manner as to admit of its publication during my lifetime. I wished to be free to devote everything to my subject that it asked of me, in the assurance that as I had no satirical vein and never cared to indulge in personalities I should, if fairly judged, always be above criticism. Of course, I wished to make full use of the right to think which was mine by birth, though always with respect for the government under which I had to live, and without ever disobeying its laws; and whilst most careful not to violate international law, I had no intention either of timorously renouncing its advantages.

  I will even admit that as a foreigner living in France I found my position most favourable for truth-telling. For I knew that if I continued, as I intended, to print nothing in the country without licence I need account to nobody for my opinions or for their publication anywhere else. I should have been much less free even at Geneva, where the magistrates would have had the right to censure the contents of my books, wherever they might have been printed. This consideration had played a great part in making me yield to Mme d’Épinay’s persuasions and give up my plan of settling in Geneva. I felt, as I have written in Émile, short of being an intriguer, if one wishes to devote one’s books to the true benefit of one’s country, one must write them abroad.

  What made me feel still happier about my position was my conviction that the government of France, though it might not look on me with great favour, would make it a point of honour, if not to protect me, at least to leave me undisturbed. It seemed to me a very simple yet skilful stroke of policy to make a virtue of tolerating what could not be prevented, since if they had expelled me from France, which was as much as they had the right to do, my books would have been written, and perhaps with less restraint. Whereas by not molesting me they would hold the author as a surety for his works and, what is more, would abolish prejudices firmly established throughout the rest of Europe by giving themselves the reputation of having an enlightened respect for international law.

  Those who conclude from the result that my confidence deceived me may perhaps be wrong themselves. In the storm that has engulfed me my books have served as a pretext; the attack was against myself. They cared very little about the author, but they wished to destroy Jean-Jacques; and the greatest crime they discovered in my writings was the honour they might bring me. But let us not anticipate. I do not know whether this mystery, which remains one to me, will hereafter be cleared up in my readers’ eyes. I only know that if my declared principles really brought down on me the treatment I suffered, it would not have been so long before I was its victim. For that piece of writing in which these principles were most boldly, if not foolhardily, stated appeared to have produced its effect even before my retirement to the Hermitage, without anyone thinking, I will not say of picking a quarrel with me, but even of preventing the work’s publication in France, where it sold as openly as in Holland. Afterwards The New Héloïse appeared with no greater difficulty and, I venture to say, gained the same applause; and, what may seem almost incredible, the profession
of faith of this same Héloïse on her deathbed is identical with that of the Savoyard vicar. All that is challenging in The Social Contract had previously appeared in the Essay on Inequality; all that is challenging in Émile was previously in Julie. Now these outspoken passages excited no murmur against the two former works; it was not they, therefore, that created an outcry against the two latter.

  Another enterprise of almost the same kind, but the plan of which had come to me later, was occupying more of my attention at that time. This was a selection from the works of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre,* whom I have been unable to mention till now owing to my preoccupation with the thread of my narrative. The idea had been suggested to me after my return from Geneva, by the Abbé de Mably, not directly but through the agency of Mme Dupin, who had a sort of interest in persuading me to take it up. She was one of the three or four Paris beauties whose spoilt child the Abbé de Saint-Pierre had been; and if she had not been his decided favourite she had at least shared the privilege with Mme d’Aiguillon. She preserved a respect and affection for the old fellow’s memory which did honour to them both, and her vanity would have been flattered to see her friend’s still-born works brought to life by the efforts of her secretary. The works themselves contained some excellent things, but so badly put that they were most tiresome to read. It is astonishing that the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who looked on his readers as his children, should nevertheless have addressed them as men, to judge by the small pains he took to make them listen to him. It was for that reason that this task had been proposed to me as useful in itself and something most suitable for a man who was industrious as a worker but idle in invention and who, since he found the pains of thinking most exhausting, preferred, if the subject were to his taste, to explain and promote the ideas of others rather than create anything new for himself. Besides, as I was not limiting myself to the part of translator, I was not prohibited from sometimes thinking for myself; and I could give such a shape to my work that many important truths might be slipped in under the cloak of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre much more happily than they could under mine. The task, however, was not easy, for it involved reading, considering, and selecting from twenty-three diffuse and muddled volumes full of boring passages, repetitions, and false or short-sighted views, out of which I had to fish some few that were fine and great and would give me courage to endure this painful labour. For my part, I was often ready to throw it up, if I could decently have withdrawn. But by receiving the Abbé’s manuscripts, which were given to me by his nephew, the Count de Saint-Pierre, at the request of Saint-Lambert, I had in a sense pledged myself to make use of them, and I was under the obligation either to return them or to try and make something out of them. It was with the latter intention that I had brought the papers to the Hermitage, and that was the first work to which I intended to devote my leisure.

  I was considering a third, the idea for which I had derived from some observations I had made upon myself, and I felt much encouraged to undertake it because I had reason to hope that if my treatment were worthy of the plan I had sketched, the book I should write would be truly useful to mankind – indeed one of the most useful that one could present to them. It has been observed that the majority of men are often in the course of their lives quite unlike themselves; they seem to be changed into quite different people. But it was not for the purpose of establishing so well known a fact that I planned to write my book; I had a more original and also more important purpose, which was to trace the causes of these changes, isolating those that depend on us in order to show how we may ourselves control them, and so become better men and more certain of ourselves. For it is, indisputably, more difficult for a decent man to resist the desires he should subdue, once they are formed, than to prevent, change, or modify these same desires at their source, if he were in the position to go back so far. A man resists temptation once because he is strong, and succumbs on another occasion because he is weak, though if he had been in his previous state he would not have succumbed.

  Looking within myself and seeking in others for the cause upon which these different states of being depended, I discovered that they had a great deal to do with our previous impressions from external objects, and that, being continually a little changed through the agency of our senses and our organs, we were unconsciously affected in our thoughts, our feelings, and even our actions by the impact of these slight changes upon us. Numerous striking examples that I had collected put the matter beyond all dispute; and thanks to their physical basis they seemed to me capable of providing an external code which, varied according to circumstances, could put or keep the mind in the state most conducive to virtue. From what errors would reason be preserved, and what vices would be choked even before birth, if one knew how to compel the brute functions to support that moral order which they so often disturb? Climates, seasons, sounds, colours, darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, repose: they all act on our machines, and consequently upon our souls, and they all offer us innumerable and almost certain opportunities for controlling those feelings which we allow to dominate us at their very onset. Such was the fundamental idea which I had already sketched out on paper and which I expected to have such an assured effect upon the nobility – who possess a sincere love of virtue and distrust their own weaknesses – that it seemed to me an easy task to put it into a book which would be as pleasant to read as it was to write. I made very little progress with this work, however, the title of which was The Morals of Sensibility or The Wise Man’s Materialism.* Distractions of which the cause will soon be clear took my attention away from it. As to the fate of my outline, which is more closely connected with my own fate than may appear, that will be revealed also.

  Besides all this, I had been thinking for some time of a system of education which Mme de Chenonceaux, who was alarmed at her husband’s methods with her son, had begged me to consider. The power of friendship caused this task, though in itself less to my taste, to occupy me more than all the rest. For this reason it is the only one of all the ideas I have just mentioned that I carried through. The ideal that I set before myself as I worked should, I think, have earned its author a better fate. But let us not anticipate here on that sad subject. I shall be compelled to talk of it only too much in the continuation of this work.

  All these various projects offered me subjects for reflection on my walks. For, as I think I have said, I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop I cease to tliink; my mind only works with my legs. I had, however, taken the precaution of providing myself with an indoor task also for rainy days. This was my Dictionary of Music, the scattered, mutilated, and shapeless nature of which made it necessary for me to rewrite it almost entirely. I had brought a few books that I needed for that purpose, and had spent two months making extracts from many others which were lent me from the King’s library, several of which I was even allowed to take with me to the Hermitage. This was material that I could put together in the house when the weather prevented my going out and I was tired of copying. This method suited me so well that I adopted it both at the Hermitage and at Montmorency, and afterwards also at Metiers, where I completed that book at the same time as I was writing others; I have always found a change of work to be a real relaxation.

  I followed the arrangements I had laid out for myself fairly exactly for some time, and found it very satisfactory. But when the fine weather brought Mme d’Épinay rather more often to Épinay or to La Chevrette I found that courtesies, which had at first cost me nothing but which I had not reckoned on, very much upset my other activities. I have already said that Mme d’Épinay possessed most amiable qualities. She was very fond of her friends and most assiduous in her kindnesses to them; and since she spared neither time nor trouble on their behalf, she most certainly deserved that they should show her some attention in return. Hitherto I had performed that duty without thinking of it as such. But now I realized that I had hung a chain round my neck, and that only friendship had so far prevented me from
feeling its weight, which I had made the heavier by my dislike of crowded receptions. Mme d’Épinay took advantage of this dislike to make me a proposition which appeared to be in my favour but which was even more favourable to her: that was to send me a message whenever she was alone or nearly so. I fell in with her idea without seeing what I was agreeing to. The consequence was that I no longer called on her at my convenience but at hers, and that I was never certain of being able to arrange for my own time on a single day. This tie considerably diminished the pleasure I had hitherto taken in going to see her. I found that the liberty she had so lavishly promised me was only granted me on condition that I never made use of it; and on the one or two occasions when I tried to do so there were so many messages, so many notes, so many fears for my health, that I plainly saw there could be no excuse except my being confined to my bed for not running to her at her first bidding. I had to submit to this yoke; and this I did with a fairly good grace for one who so loathed dependence, my sincere attachment to her preventing me to a large extent from feeling the bond that went with it. In this way she more or less filled up the voids which the absence of her usual circle left in her round of entertainments. It was a very poor substitute for her, but it was better than downright loneliness, which she could not stand. However, she had a way of filling these voids very much more easily once she decided to try her hand at literature, and got the idea of throwing together novels and letters, comedies and stories, and other nonsense of that sort. But what pleased her was not so much the writing as the reading of them; and if she managed to scribble two or three consecutive pages she had to be sure of a favourable audience of two or three at least on the conclusion of her immense labour. I seldom had the honour of being one of the chosen unless someone else invited me. On my own I was generally reckoned a complete cipher in all respects; and that not only in Mme d’Épinays society but in M. d’Holbach’s too, and wherever Grimm set the tone. This insignificance suited me perfectly except when alone with her, when I did not know what posture to assume. I dared not talk of literature since I was not a competent judge of it, or of gallantry since I was too timid and feared to be laughed at as an old beau, more than I feared death. Besides, the idea never occurred to me in Mme d’Épinary’s company, and would probably never have done so on a single occasion even if I had spent the whole of my life in her company; not that I felt any repugnance for her; on the contrary I probably loved her too well as a friend to be able to do so as a lover. I felt pleasure when I saw her and chatted with her. Her conversation, though pleasant enough in company, was dull in private; and mine, which was no more brilliant, was of no great assistance to her. Ashamed of the long silences, I strained every nerve to enliven the situation; and though I was often exhausted I was never bored. I was very glad to show her little attentions, and to give her the most fraternal of little kisses, which seemed to arouse her sensuality as little as they did mine; but that was all. She was very thin, very fair, and with a chest as flat as my hand. That defect alone would have been enough to freeze me; for neither my heart nor my senses have ever been able to think of one without breasts as a woman; and other reasons which I have no need to mention* always caused me to forget her sex when with her.