Confessions

Jean-Jacques

Subject and prosecutor of himself, inventing the modern autobiographical ‘I’.

Madame de Warens

Protector and lover, the book’s first education in dependence.

Sincerity

To tell all is offered as a moral act, even when it is also self-justification.

Nature and society

The self is most itself before, or against, social masks.

Origin scenes that later Romanticism will treat as scripture.

The writer as misunderstood wanderer among the fashionable.