Confessions, volumes 1 and 2: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Confessions, volumes 1 and 2, credited to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Confessions, volumes 1 and 2, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Read by Martin Geeson. “Thus I have acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.” Rousseau’s lengthy and sometimes anguished dossier on the Self is one of the most remarkable and courageous works of introspection ever undertaken. Some readers may be repelled by his tendency to revel in embarrassing accounts of humiliation and fiasco, as if he were striving too hard to achieve an ultimate nakedness, a nakedness of the soul perhaps. Others may recall the compulsive self-searching of the narrator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, who also rather dwelt on the co-existence in the individual of the vile and the virtuous. The two opening volumes of the Confessions, presented in this inevitably censored edition of 1903, deal with the author’s childhood and callow adolescence. Here he is... (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Confessions, volumes 1 and 2
• Author credits: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 18
• Listed recording duration: 5:10:31

Catalogue topics

• non-fiction
• memoirs
• psychology
• Rousseau.

Track guide

1. 01 - Book 1: ''I have entered upon a performance…'' — 22:48
2. 02 - ''How could I become cruel or vicious…'' — 20:36
3. 03 - ''If ever education was perfectly chaste…'' — 18:07
4. 04 - ''Near thirty years passed away…'' — 20:51
5. 05 - ''I had already become a redresser of grievances…'' — 13:08
6. 06 - ''Thus before my future destination…'' — 12:07
7. 07 - ''My master had a journeyman…'' — 16:23
8. 08 - ''I never thought money so desirable…'' — 14:25
9. 09 - ''In less than a year I had exhausted…'' — 12:53
10. 10 - Vol. 2: ''The moment in which fear…'' — 18:56
11. 11 - ''Louise-Eleonore de Warens…'' — 16:35
12. 12 - ''The difficulty still remained…'' — 17:08
13. 13 - ''My pleasing inquietudes…'' — 18:47
14. 14 - ''It is understood, I believe, that a child…'' — 16:02
15. 15 - ''At length, sufficiently instructed…'' — 15:05
16. 16 - ''Walking one morning, pretty early…'' — 18:22
17. 17 - ''To return to our Aegisthus, the fluter…'' — 17:54
18. 18 - ''Madame de Vercellis never addressed a word to me…'' — 20:31

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.