Confessions Author:Jean-Jacques Rousseau Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: deprived me of the courage to show myself; and the necessity of paying visits to people made them so unendurable, that I even gave up going to see the Academicia... more »ns and other men of letters, with whom I was already on more or less intimate terms. Marivaux, the Abb6 de Mably, and Fontenelle were almost the only persons whom I still continued to visit. I even showed my comedy of Narcisse to the first. He was pleased with it, and was kind enough to touch it up. Diderot, who was not so old, was about my own age. He was fond of music, and acquainted with the theory of it; wo talked about it, and he also spoke to me of his own literary projects. This resulted in a most intimate connection between us, which lasted fifteen years, and would probably have still continued, if I had not, unfortunately, and by his own fault, been thrown into the same profession as himself. No one would guess how I employed this brief and precious interval, which still remained to me before I was compelled to beg my bread. I learned by heart passages from the poets which I had already learnt a hundred times and forgotten. Every morning, about ten o'clock, I used to walk in the Luxembourg Gardens with a Virgil or Rousseau1 in my pocket, and, until dinner-time, I recommitted to memory a sacred ode or an eclogue, without being discouraged by the fact that, while going over the task of the day, I was sure to forget what I had learnt the day before. I remembered that, after the defeat of Nicias at Syracuse, the Athenian prisoners supported themselves by reciting the poems of Homer. The lesson which I drew from this specimen of erudition, in order to prepare myself against poverty, was to exercise my admirable memory in learning all the poets by heart. I possessed an equally solid expedient in chess, to which I ...« less