Franklin Library Easton Press leather edition of "The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau," a limited edition, Translated by A.S. B. Glover, Illustrated by 

William Sharp, one of the 100 GREATEST BOOKS EVER WRITTEN series, published in 1980.  Bound in green leather, the book has camel tan French moire silk end leaves, acid-free paper, Symth-sewn binding, a satin book marker, hubbed spine, gold gilding on three edges---in FINE condition.  Jean Jacques Rousseau, who lived from 1712-1778, was born in Switzerland, the son of a watch maker and grandson of a Calvinist minister. At twelve, Rousseau was apprenticed to an engraver with whom he spent four unhappy years.  He was beaten and his only pleasures were reading and taking long walks in the countryside.  He abandoned his master before his sixteenth birthday.  Without money or possessions, he started walking until he reached a village where a kindly priest took him in, fed him, and sent him to his first important woman in his life, the Baronne de Warens.  She was 29 and separated from her husband.  Having converted Rousseau to Catholicism,  she sent him to a hospice in Turin.  Years later he called this conversion "at bottom the act of a bandit." Eventually he returned to Madame de Warens and they became lovers and he managed her business affairs.  At age thirty, Rousseau was unknown, a self-educated rustic with few social graces.  He arrived in Paris in 1742 and took a position with the French Ambassador to Venice in 1743.  Back in Paris in 1745, he began a relationship with THERESE LEVASEUR that would last the rest of his life. "She gave me the confidence, the want of which has has always hindered me from being myself. . .She was neither pretty nor young, but not being ugly or old, she had nothing in her person which prevented her with and grace from having all their effect." They became parents to five children who were placed in foundling homes.  Rousseau criticized THOMAS HOBBES and JOHN LOCKE for their failure to probe the origins of man. Rousseau argued that man was "self-sufficient; he knew neither virtue or vice, but primarily the art of self-preservation. In the "Social Contract," he wrote: "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others and still remains a greater slave than they." Rousseau was absolutely without a forerunner or model---an intellectual wonder of the eighteenth century. 635 pages.  I offer combined shipping.