I came into the world with so few signs of life, that they entertained but little hope of preserving me, with the seeds of a disorder that has gathered strength with years, and from which I am now relieved at intervals, only to suffer a different, though more intolerable evil.  I owed my preservation to one of my father’s sisters, an amiable and virtuous girl, who took the most tender care of me; she is yet living, nursing, at the age of four—­score, a husband younger than herself, but worn out with excessive drinking.  Dear aunt!  I freely forgive your having preserved my life, and only lament that it is not in my power to bestow on the decline of your days the tender solicitude and care you lavished on the first dawn of mine.  My nurse, Jaqueline, is likewise living:  and in good health—­the hands that opened my eyes to the light of this world may close them at my death.  We suffer before we think; it is the common lot of humanity.  I experienced more than my proportion of it.  I have no knowledge of what passed prior to my fifth or sixth year; I recollect nothing of learning to read, I only remember what effect the first considerable exercise of it produced on my mind; and from that moment I date an uninterrupted knowledge of myself.

Every night, after supper, we read some part of a small collection of romances which had been my mother’s.  My father’s design was only to improve me in reading, and he thought these entertaining works were calculated to give me a fondness for it; but we soon found ourselves so interested in the adventures they contained, that we alternately read whole nights together, and could not bear to give over until at the conclusion of a volume.  Sometimes, in a morning, on hearing the swallows at our window, my father, quite ashamed of this weakness, would cry, “Come, come, let us go to bed; I am more a child than thou art.”

I soon acquired, by this dangerous custom, not only an extreme facility in reading and comprehending, but, for my age, a too intimate acquaintance with the passions.  An infinity of sensations were familiar to me, without possessing any precise idea of the objects to which they related—­I had conceived nothing—­I had felt the whole.  This confused succession of emotions did not retard the future efforts of my reason, though they added an extravagant, romantic notion of human life, which experience and reflection have never been able to eradicate.

My romance reading concluded with the summer of 1719, the following winter was differently employed.  My mother’s library being quite exhausted, we had recourse to that part of her father’s which had devolved to us; here we happily found some valuable books, which was by no means extraordinary, having been selected by a minister that truly deserved that title, in whom learning (which was the rage of the times) was but a secondary commendation, his taste and good sense being most conspicuous.  The history of the Church and Empire by Le Sueur, Bossuett’s Discourses on Universal History, Plutarch’s Lives, the history of Venice by Nani, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, La Bruyere, Fontenelle’s World, his Dialogues of the Dead, and a few volumes of Moliere, were soon ranged in my father’s closet, where, during the hours he was employed in his business, I daily read them, with an avidity and taste uncommon, perhaps unprecedented at my age.