The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is actually avowed.

Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness, untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices.
The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering kind, seldom breaking out into active flame.

There is a certain sordidness in the scene.

You may complain that the details which Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid.

Yet such things are the web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to full manhood in every case mark a crisis.