"Rousseau, Jean-Jacques - Confessions of Jean-jacques Rousseau, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rousseau Jacques)

the conclusion of a volume. Sometimes, in a morning, on hearing the

swallows at our window, my father, quite ashamed of this weakness,

would cry, "Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than

thou art."

I soon acquired, by this dangerous custom, not only an extreme

facility in reading and comprehending, but, for my age, a too intimate

acquaintance with the passions. An infinity of sensations were

familiar to me, without possessing any precise idea of the objects

to which they related- I had conceived nothing- I had felt the

whole. This confused succession of emotions did not retard the

future efforts of my reason, though they added an extravagant,

romantic notion of human life, which experience and reflection have

never been able to eradicate.

My romance reading concluded with the summer of 1719, the

following winter was differently employed. My mother's library being

quite exhausted, we had recourse to that part of her father's which

had devolved to us; here we happily found some valuable books, which

was by no means extraordinary, having been selected by a minister that

truly deserved that title, in whom learning (which was the rage of the

times) was but a secondary commendation, his taste and good sense

being most conspicuous. The history of the Church and Empire by Le

Sueur, Bossuett's Discourses on Universal History, Plutarch's Lives,

the History of Venice by Nani, Ovid's Metamorphoses, La Bruyere,

Fontenelle's World, his Dialogues of the Dead, and a few volumes of

Moliere, were soon ranged in my father's closet, where, during the