Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in 1712 in the Republic of Geneva. At the age of 16, he ran away from the city.

In neighbouring Savoie, he found shelter with a priest, who put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytiser in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary for an ailing countess.

At the age of 20 or 21, Rousseau returned to Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, Rousseau considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman (“Mummy”), and she him Mon petit (“My little one”).

In those years, Rousseau struggled to establish himself in a career and spent a year travelling. He travelled mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his passion for music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of 27, he took up a position as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.

With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of 30, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery but found his system impractical and rejected it.

In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He revelled in Italian music but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.

He met a laundry girl called Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were........

© Psychology Today