Like all children, but even more than others, I felt before I thought; and my consciousness was first awakened by reading stories with my father.  Sometimes we read together until the birds were singing in the morning light.  These tales gave me a most precocious insight into human passions, and the confused emotions which swept through me brought with them the queerest and most romantic views of life.  But when I was seven we came to the end of my mother’s old stock of romances, and we fell back on Bossuet, Moliere, Plutarch, Ovid, and the like.  Plutarch went far to cure me of novels; indeed, his “Lives” were the means of forming that free and republican spirit, intolerant of servitude, which has been my torment.  To my aunt, who knew endless songs, and used to chant them with a sweet, tiny thread of a voice, I owe my passion for music.

These, then, were my first affections.  These formed that heart of mine, so proud yet so tender; they fashioned that effeminate yet untamable character, which has ever drifted between weakness and virtue.  For I have been in contradiction with myself, in such a way that abstinence and fruition, pleasure and wisdom, have escaped me equally.

My father having left Geneva, I remained under the care of my uncle Bernard, and was placed, with his son of my own age, in the house of M. Lambercier, protestant minister at Bossey, to learn all the trivialities that are called education.  Here I gained my keen love of country pleasures, and tasted, with my cousin, the delights of simple friendship.  But a cruel punishment for a fault which I had not committed, put an end to my childish simplicity, and soon I left Bossey without regret.  There followed two or three years of indolence at Geneva.

After a brief and luckless trial of a notary’s office I was apprenticed to an engraver, a petty tyrant, whose injustice taught me to lie and to steal.  Restless, dissatisfied, and in perpetual terror of my master’s savagery, I here reached my sixteenth year.  But one day, finding the city gates closed on my return from a country excursion, I determined, rather than face the inevitable thrashing, to seek my fortune in the unknown world.

Madame de Warens

How fair were the illusions of freedom and of the future!  I asked little—­only a manor where I should be the favourite of the lord of the land, his daughter’s lover, her brother’s friend, and protector of the neighbourhood.  I roamed the countryside, sleeping at nights in hospitable cottages, and on arriving at Confignon I called, out of curiosity, on M. de Ponteverre, the parish priest.  He gave me a dinner which convinced me, even more than his arguments, of the advantages of the catholic faith; and I was willing enough to set off, with his introduction, to Annecy.  Here I was to seek Mme. de Warens, a recent convert, who was in receipt of a pension from the King of Sardinia.  I was assured that her benevolence would support me for the present.  Three days later I was at Annecy.