Page "Jean-Jacques Rousseau" Paragraph 10

When Rousseau was 10, his father, an avid hunter, got into a legal quarrel with a wealthy landowner on whose lands he had been caught trespassing.

To avoid certain defeat in the courts, he moved away to Nyon in the territory of Bern, taking Rousseau's aunt Suzanne with him.

He remarried, and from that point Jean-Jacques saw little of him.

Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who packed him, along with his own son, Abraham Bernard, away to board for two years with a Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside Geneva.

Here the boys picked up the elements of mathematics and drawing.

Rousseau, who was always deeply moved by religious services, for a time even dreamed of becoming a Protestant minister.