With the summer of 1719 the romance-reading terminated.... "The History of the Church and Empire" by Lesueur, Bossuet's "Dissertation on Universal History," Plutarch's "Lives," Nani's "History of Venice," Ovid's "Metamorphoses," "La Bruyère," Fontenelle's "Worlds," his "Dialogues of the Dead," and a few volumes of Molière, were transported into my father's shop; and I read them to him every day during his work. For this employment I acquired a rare, and, for my age, perhaps unprecedented, taste. Plutarch especially became my favorite reading. The pleasure which I found in incessantly reperusing him, cured me in some measure of the romance madness; and I soon came to prefer Agesilaus, Brutus, and Aristides, to Orondates, Artemenes, and Juba. From these interesting studies, joined to the conversations to which they gave rise with my father, resulted that free, republican spirit, that haughty and untamable character, fretful of restraint or subjection, which has tormented me my life long, and that in situations the least suitable for giving it play. Incessantly occupied with Rome and Athens, living, so to speak, with their great men, born myself the citizen of a republic [Geneva], the son of a father with whom patriotism was the ruling passion, I caught the flame from him--I imagined myself a Greek or a Roman, and became the personage whose life I was reading. On such food of reading and of reverie, young Rousseau's imagination and sentiment battened, while his reason and his practical sense starved and died within him. Unconsciously thus in part was formed the dreamer of the "Émile" and of "The Social Contract." Another glimpse of the home-life--if home-life such experience can be called--of this half-orphan, homeless Genevan boy:-- I had a brother, my elder by seven years.... He fell into the ways of debauchery, even before he was old enough to be really a libertine.... I remember once when my father was chastising him severely and in anger, that I impetuously threw myself between them, clasping him tightly. I thus covered him with my body, receiving the blows that were aimed at him; and I held out so persistently in this position, that whether softened by my cries and tears, or fearing that I should get the worst of it, my father was forced to forgive him. In the end my brother turned out so bad that he ran away and disappeared altogether. It is pathetic--Rousseau's attempted contrast following, between the paternal neglect of his older brother and the paternal indulgence of himself:--