Jean Jacques handed the peasantry of France a reading-glass; Voltaire did as much for the nobility.
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Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Switzerland, which land, as all folks know, has produced her full quota and more of reformers. The father of Jean Jacques, quite naturally, was a watchmaker, with mainspring ill-adjusted and dial askew, according to the report of the son, who claimed to be full-jeweled, but was not perfectly adjusted to position and temperature. Jean Jacques tells us that his first misfortune was his birth, and this cost his mother her life. He was adopted by Time and Chance and fed by Fate. When the lad was ten the father fled from Geneva to escape the penalty of a foolish brawl, and never again saw the son who was to rescue the family-name from oblivion.
Kinsmen of the mother gave the boy into the hands of a retired clergyman who levied polite blackmail on his former constituents by asking them to place children, their own and others, in his hands that they might be taught the way of life—and that the clergyman might live, which, according to Whistlerian philosophy, was unnecessary.
That the boy was clever, shrewd, quick to learn, secretive as castaway children ever are, can well be understood. He became a secretary, an engineer, a valet, a waiter, working life's gamut backward, thus proving that in human service there is no high nor low degree, only this: he, at this time, knew nothing about human service—he was fighting for existence.
Knowledge comes through desire, but where desire comes from no man can say. It surely is not a matter of will.
Jean Jacques had a hunger for knowledge, and this, some wise men say, is the precious legacy of mother to son. He wanted to know!
And it was this desire that shaped his career.
He asked questions of priests all day long, because he was filled with the fallacy that priests knew the secrets of the unknowable and were on friendly terms with God.
To escape importunity a priest sent him to Madame De Warens. Now Madame was a widow, rich and volatile, filled with a holy religious zeal. Where religion begins and sex ends no man can say—the books are silent and revelation is dumb. Indeed, there be those who are so bold as to say that art, love and religion are one.