Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he showed special inclination.[14] It was a question whether he was to be made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister.  His own preference, as his after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of the three; “for I thought it a fine thing,” he says, “to preach.”  The uncle was a man of pleasure, and as often happens in such circumstances, his love of pleasure had the effect of turning his wife into a pietist.  Their son was Rousseau’s constant comrade.  “Our friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together, the simplest amusements were a delight.”  They made kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make watches like him.  In the same cheerful imitative spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe energy to exhortation.  They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood.  These ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors.  All this is an old story in every biography written or unwritten.  It seldom fails to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures.

And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in Genevese youth in after years.  “In my time,” he says admiringly, “children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to keep....  Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty, combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of; they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing.  They returned home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their country and blood to shed for her.  May we be able to say as much one day of our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out children at thirty."[15]