It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into
exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life
led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are
despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He
told lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He
cunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of
using his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in
idle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult
moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain
ugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds
themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more
considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create
a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is
actually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice
brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness,
untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices.
The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering
kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain
sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which
Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the
web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to
full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the
education of home and family, and they presage definitely what is to
come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown for this short
space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn from their
fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a little
dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence
which is not oblivion.

After a time the character of Jean Jacques was absolutely broken down.