Audiobook: Confessions, volumes 3 and 4

“The smallest, the most trifling pleasure that is conveniently within my reach, tempts me more than all the joys of paradise.”

Here again is the youthful, hero-worshiping Jean-Jacques – displaying an emotional immaturity that leads him into picaresque escapades in the company of transients and misfits, always ending in reunion with mother-surrogate Madame de Warens.

In a literally unprecedented gesture of self-revelation, Rousseau opens Volume 3 exposing himself indecently in dark alleyways. This 1903 edition fails to appreciate the humorous strangeness of the passage and removes it to protect the reader. (Summary by Martin Geeson)