“Is it not supremely ridiculous to educate boys like young girls? Ah, it is truly fine to see these little twelve-year-old fops, walking out, their hands plump, their voices delicate (flutées), with pretty green parasols to protect them from the sun. They were less finical in my country: children, brought up in rustic fashion, had no complexions to preserve; they feared no harm from the air. Their fathers took them out hunting and gave them all kinds of exercise. They were reserved and modest in the presence of their elders; they were bold, proud, even quarrelsome, among themselves; they were rivals in wrestling, running, boxing; they were skilled in fencing. They came home rugged; they were genuine little rascals; but they grew into men whose hearts were full of zeal in their country’s service and ready to give their lives for her.”
In April, 1725, he was apprenticed to an engraver, named Abel Ducommun, Rue des Etuves, Number 96, third floor. He liked the trade, for, as he says, he had a lively taste for drawing; but his master was brutal, and at last, on a Sunday evening in March, 1728, having been locked out of the city through returning too late from a long walk beyond the walls and having spent the night wretchedly on the glacis “in a transport of despair” he suddenly swore never to return to his master’s. Rogers, in one of his poems, thus refers to this inhospitality on the part of Geneva, which, of course, was possible only in a small city surrounded with walls:—
“On my way I went.
Thy gates, Geneva, swinging heavily,
Thy gates so slow to open, swift to shut;
As on that Sabbath-eve when He arrived,
Whose name is now thy glory, now by thee
Such virtue dwells in those small syllables,
Inscribed to consecrate the narrow street.
His birth-place,—when but one short step too late,