Introduction

'I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.' Rousseau wrote this autobiography in his last years, beginning with his childhood in Geneva: his mother died giving birth to him, his father was a watchmaker; at sixteen he ran away, wandered into Savoy and found refuge with Madame de Warens; later he became famous in Paris, befriended and then quarrelled with Diderot and others, and was driven into exile. He tells his shameful acts without concealment: he stole a ribbon and let an innocent maidservant take the blame, and he left all five of his children at the foundling hospital. The book founded modern autobiography, and its delicate rendering of inner feeling deeply influenced Romantic literature.