The Confessions

At age 21, Rousseau takes the job as a secretary for the Intendant-General, completing land surveying for the government. He spends eight to nine years in this position, happily living with Madame de Warens and pursuing music in his spare time. Claude Anet, another man living with Madame de Warens, is a botanist and apothecary. Anet and Warens have a sexual relationship, but Rousseau finds him agreeable and interesting to talk with. He becomes Anet’s pupil; studying helps him ward off the restlessness that became his habit in his youth. He studies math, drawing, and music, and he consumes news and opera. His favorite moments are those spent in the country with Warens. She puts on small concerts, and Rousseau manages the music for these events.

Rousseau begins tutoring music again. Now a young man, he maintains flirtatious relationships with his students and their mothers. One mother lavishes so much attention and so many caresses on Rousseau that he feels the need to confide in Madame de Warens. Her demeanor changes, and she begins treating him with more seriousness. Still inexperienced with sex, Rousseau is taken aback when Madame de Warens makes an explicit offer: She tells him he has eight days to consider her offer of a sexual relationship. His feelings are mixed; he both desires her and sees her as a mother figure. When he agrees to her proposal, he finds the experience a mixture of shame and pleasure.

Rousseau, Anet, and Warens live together happily, each man carrying forward with his relationship. Anet then dies suddenly, and Rousseau feels he must take the place of the financially responsible Anet. He decides to find a means to support Warens and leaves to study composition. He is accosted by the French government, however, and returns home. He continues to pursue music at home with Madame de Warens and to develop his intellectual interests. His curiosity about physics causes Rousseau to experiment with ingesting chalk and orpiment, an arsenic sulfide mineral, and his health rapidly declines. Madame de Warens nurses him, and he improves, but his health never fully recovers. He convinces Warens to take a vacation home in the countryside, and he is never happier than spending time in nature with Warens.

Rousseau’s time in the little house in the countryside is extremely happy, even though it is marked by illness. He attempts to use hydropathy—or water cures, such as drinking water and taking steam baths—to cure his ailments, but his condition continues to grow worse. His heart palpitations and the buzzing in his ears continue for the rest of his life. He decides to get the most out of what little life he perceives he has remaining. More attached to Warens than ever, Rousseau stops teaching music and spending time with society. He studies eagerly and halts his attempts to cure himself. When gardening requires too much physical exertion for his condition, he takes up caring for pigeons. His days fall into a rhythm: breakfasting with mamma, gardening, reading, studying, walking, praying, tending to his pigeons, and eating. He does not make great strides with his studying because nature always distracts him.

Warens began profiting from the small agricultural endeavors she pursues at their countryside getaway, and Rousseau travels to Geneva to claim his mother’s small fortune. As he studies anatomy, he becomes obsessed again with finding a cure for his illness. Warens encourages him to travel to meet with renowned physicians. On his journey, he pretends to be an Englishman named Mr. Dudding and has an affair. He feels that this relationship differs from the one with Madame de Warens because it is solely about pleasure and is not tinged with the sadness he feels at the strangeness of his connection with mamma. However, he feels guilty for the affair and rushes back to Warens, whom he finds engaged with another younger man.

Rousseau attempts to help the young man in the way that Anet took Rousseau under his wing, but Warens’s new lover is louder, more boisterous, and less studious than he. Feeling replaced and no longer needed, he leaves Warens’s home to become a private tutor. He begins stealing again but soon quits, returning once more to Warens. He finds that the past revelry he enjoyed with her is gone, so he leaves her to try again to make a living with music.