What else was it but this that so stirred Rousseau, the precocious genius of Geneva, and his boyish member, and brought such ideas into his head, when on one occasion Mlle. Lambercier, cracking the whip upon the buttocks of the child, inflicted that punishment, which he afterwards was longing for all the rest of his life? Hear him relate the circumstance himself in his merry way and with his habitual charm of style, in the first book of the _Confessions_; we only omit small matters, added by the immortal author for the amplification of the narrative: “As Mlle. Lambercier had for us the affection of a mother, so she had the authority of one, and she carried the latter so far as to inflict upon us the punishment of children when we had deserved it. For a long time she only used threats, and such a threat of a novel punishment seemed very dreadful to me; but after the execution I found the experience less terrible than the expectation, and the oddest thing was, the punishment made me more partial to her, who had inflicted it, than I had been previously. I stood in fact in need of all this affection for her and of all my natural mildness, in order to hold back from provoking the same punishment by acting so as to deserve it, for I had found in the pain, and even in the shame, a mixed feeling, in which sensuality predominated, and which left me with more desire than apprehension of experiencing the same treatment over again from the same hand. Who would believe that this chastisement of a child eight years old by the hand of a maiden of thirty should have influenced my tastes, my longings, my passions for the remainder of my life? Tormented by I know not what, my eye feasted ardently upon good-looking females; they constantly came into my mind doing to me as Mlle. Lambercier had done. Imagining only what I had experienced, my desires did not pass beyond the sort of voluptuous feeling I had known already. In my foolish fancies, in my erotic fury, in the extravagant acts to which they incited me sometimes, I borrowed in imagination the help of the other sex, without ever dreaming it was good for any other use than that which I wanted to make of it. When in the course of time I had grown up to manhood, my old taste of childhood associated itself so much with the other, that I never could divert the desires which fired my senses; and this absurdity, joined to my natural timidity, made me always anything but enterprising with women, as I dared not say all or could not do all I wanted; the sort of enjoyment, of which the other was for me but the last stage, could neither be initiated by the one who longed for it, nor guessed by the other who might have granted it. Thus I have passed through life coveting, yet not daring to tell the persons I loved most what it was I coveted. Never bold