This comparison of my own misery with the good fortune of others dashed the roses of my childhood and blighted my blossoming youth. The first time that I, taken in by a semblance of generosity, put out my hand to take the longed-for treat from a hypocrite who offered it, the boy snatched it away, raising a shout of laughter among the others who were aware of the practical joke.
If the loftiest minds are accessible to vanity, we may surely pardon a child for crying when he finds himself despised and made game of. Treated thus, most children would become greedy, sneaking, and mean. To avoid persecution, I fought my foes; the courage of despair made me formidable, but I was detested, and remained without defence against treachery. One evening, as I left school, a handkerchief, tightly rolled and full of stones, struck me on the back. When the valet, who avenged me amply, told my mother about it, she only said:
“That dreadful child will never be anything but a trouble to us!”
I then suffered the most miserable distrust of myself, discerning at school the same repulsion as was felt for me by my family. I was thrown in on myself at school and at home. A second fall of snow checked the blossoming of the germs sown in my soul. Those who were loved were, I saw, sturdy rascals; with this I comforted my pride, and I dwelt alone. Thus there was no end to the impossibility of pouring out the feelings which swelled my poor little heart. Seeing me always alone, hated and dejected, the master confirmed my parents’ unjust notions as to my evil nature.
As soon as I could read and write, my mother had me exiled to Pont-le-Voy, a school managed by Oratorians, who received children of my age into a class designated as that of the Pas latins,2 which also included scholars whose defective intelligence had precluded the rudiments. There I remained for eight years, seeing no one, and leading the life of a Pariah. And this was why. I had but three francs a month for pocket-money, a sum which barely sufficed for the pens, knives, rulers, ink and paper, with which we had to provide ourselves. And so, being unable to buy stilts, or ropes, or any of the things needed for schoolboy amusements, I was banished from every game; to gain admittance I must either have toadied the rich or have flattered the strong boys in my division. Now the least idea of such meanness, which children so often drift into, raised my gorge.
I used to sit under a tree reading the books given out to us once a month by the librarian. How much anguish lay hidden in the depths of this unnatural isolation, what misery this desertion caused me! Imagine what my tender soul must have felt when, at the first distribution of prizes, I was awarded the two most anxiously looked for—that for composition and that for translation! When I went up to the platform to receive them, in the midst of applause and cheers, I had neither father nor mother to rejoice with me, while the room was full of my comrades’ parents. Instead of kissing the visitor who distributed the prizes, as was usual, I threw myself on his breast and melted into tears. In the evening I burnt my laurel crowns in the stove. The other boys’ parents stayed in the town during the week of examinations preceding the prize-giving, so that my schoolfellows went off next morning in high glee; while I, whose parents were only a few leagues away, remained at school with the “Outre-mers” a name given to boys whose families lived in the islands or abroad. In the evening, while prayers were read, the barbarous little wretches would boast of the good dinners they had had at home.
You will see that my misfortunes went on growing in proportion to the circumference of the social spheres in which I moved. How many efforts have I not made to invalidate the sentence which condemned me to live in myself alone! How many hopes long cherished, with a thousand soul-felt aspirations, have been destroyed in a single day! To induce my parents to come to the school, I wrote them letters full of feeling, rather emphatically worded perhaps—but should these letters have drawn down on me my mother’s reproaches and ironical comments on my style? Still, not discouraged, I promised to do all my parents insisted on as the conditions of a visit; I implored my sisters’ aid, writing to them on their name-days and birthdays with the punctuality of a hapless, deserted child—but with vain persistency.
As the day for prize-giving approached, I made my entreaties more urgent, and wrote of my hopes of success. Deceived by my parents’ silence, I expected them with exultant hopes, telling my schoolfellows that they were coming; and when, as family parties began to arrive, the old porter’s step echoed along the passages, I felt sick with anticipation. But the old man never uttered my name.
One day when I confessed that I had cursed my existence, the priest spoke to me of Heaven, where the palm branch grows that the Saviour promised to the Beati qui lugent. So in preparing for my first communion, I threw myself into the mystic gulf of prayer, bewitched by religious notions,
