JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

"All my life I will remember a plant excursion I made one day near the Robaila, a mountain farm belonging to Justiciary Clerc. I was alone; I went deep into the winding crevices of the mountain; and passing from wood to wood and boulder to boulder, I arrived at a retreat so hidden that I have never seen a more desolate sight in my life. Black pines we reinterspersed with prodigious beeches, several of which had fallen from old age and become interlaced with one another, thereby closing off this retreat with impenetrable barriers... I began to dream more at ease thinking that I was in a refuge unknown to the whole universe... I compared myself to the great travellers who discover an uninhabited island, and I said to myself with self-satisfaction ‘Without a doubt, I am the first mortal to have penetrated thus far.... ’ While I preened myself with this idea, I heard not far from me a certain clanking I thought I recognized; I listened— the same noise was repeated and increased. Surprised and curious, I got up, burst through a thicket of brush on the side from which the noise was coming, and, in a little hollow twenty feet from the very place where I believed myself to have been the first to arrive, I saw a stocking mill. "