But this constant torment gave me the habit of exerting a force which increased with exercise, and predisposed my soul to moral fortitude. Always on the lookout for some new misery, as martyrs expect a fresh blow, my whole being must have expressed a gloomy dejection which stifled all the graces and impulses of childhood, a condition which was regarded as a symptom of idiocy, justifying my mother’s ominous prognostics. A sense of this injustice gave rise in my spirit to a premature feeling of pride, the outcome of reason, which, no doubt, was a check on the evil disposition fostered by such a manner of education.
Though completely neglected by my mother, I was occasionally the cause of some scruples in her mind; she sometimes talked of my learning something, and expressed a purpose of teaching me; then I shuddered miserably at the thought of the anguish of daily contact with her. I blessed my deserted loneliness, and was happy in being left in the garden to play with pebbles, watch the insects, and gaze at the blue sky.
Though isolation made me dreamy, my love of meditation had its rise in an incident which will give you an idea of my first woes. I was so entirely overlooked that the governess often forgot to put me to bed. One evening, peacefully sitting under a fig-tree, I was looking at a star with the passionate curiosity known to children, to which, in me, precocious melancholy gave a sort of sentimental intuition. My sisters were playing and shouting; I head the remote clatter like an accompaniment of my thoughts. The noise presently ceased; night fell. By chance my mother noticed my absence. To avert a scolding, our governess, a certain terrible Mademoiselle Caroline, justified my mother’s affected fears by declaring that I had a horror of home; that if she had not watched me narrowly, I should have run away before then; that I was not weak of intellect, but sly; that of all the children she had ever had care of, she had never known one whose disposition was so vile as mine.
She then pretended to search for me, and called me; I replied; she came to the fig-tree where she knew that I was.
“What have you been doing here?” she asked.
“I was looking at a star.”
“You were not looking at a star,” cried my mother, who was listening from her balcony, “as if a child of your age could know anything of astronomy!”
“Oh, madame,” cried Mademoiselle Caroline, “He turned on the tap of the cistern, the garden is flooded!”
There was a great commotion. My sisters had amused themselves with turning the tap to see the water flow; but, startled by a spurt sideways that had wetted them all over, they lost their head, and fled without turning the water off again. Accused and convicted of having devised this piece of mischief, and of lying when I asserted my innocence, I was severely punished. But, worst of all, I was mocked at for my love of stargazing, and my mother forbade my staying in the garden in the evening.
Tyrannical prohibitions give zest to a passion, even more in children than in men; children have the advantage of thinking of nothing else but the forbidden thing, which then becomes irresistibly fascinating. So I was often caned for my star. Unable to confide my woes to any human being, I told my griefs to the star in that exquisite internal warbling by which a child lisps its first ideas as he has already lisped his first words. At the age of twelve, a boy at school, I still contemplated it with a sense of unspeakable rapture, so deep are the marks set on the heart by the impressions received in the dawn of life.
My brother Charles, five years my senior, was not less handsome as a child than he is as a man; he was my father’s favorite, my mother’s darling, the hope of the family, and consequently the king of the household. Well made and strong, he had a tutor. I, frail and sickly, was sent, at the age of five, to a day-school in the town, whither I was taken in the morning by my father’s valet, who fetched me home in the afternoon. I took my midday meal in a basket but scantily filled, while my comrades brought ample supplies. This contrast of my necessity with their abundance was the source of much suffering. The famous rillettes and rillons1 of Tours formed the larger part of our midday luncheon, between breakfast in the morning and late dinner at the hour of our return home. This preparation, highly prized by some epicures, is rarely seen at Tours on any genteel table; though I may have heard of it before going to school, I had never been so happy as to see the brown confection spread on a slice of bread for my own eating; but even if it had not been a fashionable dainty at school, my longing for it would have been no less eager, for it had become a fixed idea in my brain, just as the stews concocted by her porter’s wife inspired a longing in one of the most elegant of Paris duchesses, who, being a woman, gratified her fancy.
Children can read such a longing in each other’s eyes just as you can read love; thenceforth I was a standing laughingstock. My schoolfellows, almost all of the shopkeeper class,
