Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Confessions, volumes 3 and 4 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
“The smallest, the most trifling pleasure that is conveniently within my reach, tempts me more than all the joys of paradise.”
Here again is the youthful, hero-worshiping Jean-Jacques – displaying an emotional immaturity that leads him into picaresque escapades in the company of transients and misfits, always ending in reunion with mother-surrogate Madame de Warens.
In a literally unprecedented gesture of self-revelation, Rousseau opens Volume 3 exposing himself indecently in dark alleyways. This 1903 edition fails to appreciate the humorous strangeness of the passage and removes it to protect the reader.
(Summary by Martin Geeson)
Here again is the youthful, hero-worshiping Jean-Jacques – displaying an emotional immaturity that leads him into picaresque escapades in the company of transients and misfits, always ending in reunion with mother-surrogate Madame de Warens.
In a literally unprecedented gesture of self-revelation, Rousseau opens Volume 3 exposing himself indecently in dark alleyways. This 1903 edition fails to appreciate the humorous strangeness of the passage and removes it to protect the reader.
(Summary by Martin Geeson)
