My father having conceived some doubts as to the tendency of the Oratorian teaching, came to fetch me from Pont-le-Voy, and placed me in a boardinghouse for boys in Paris, situated in the Marais. I was now fifteen. On examination as to the requirements, the pupil from Pont-le-Voy was judged capable of entering the third class. The miseries I had endured at home, at day-school, and at Pont-le-Voy were renewed under a new aspect during my life at the pension Lepître. My father gave me no money. When my parents had ascertained that I could be fed, clothed, crammed with Latin, and stuffed with Greek, that was enough. In the whole course of my career at school and college, I have known perhaps a thousand fellow-students, and I never heard of a case of such utter indifference.
Monsieur Lepître, a fanatical adherent of the Bourbons, had been thrown in my father’s way at the time when some devoted Royalists tried to rescue Queen Marie Antoinette from the Temple; they had since renewed their acquaintance. Hence Monsieur Lepître conceived it his duty to remedy my father’s oversight; but the sum he allowed me monthly was small, for he did not know what my parents’ intentions might be.
M. Lepître occupied a fine old house, the Hôtel Joyeuse, where, as in all the ancient residences of the nobility, there was a lodge for a gate-porter. During the hour of recreation, before the usher took us in a file to the Lycée Charlemagne, the wealthy boys got breakfast at the lodge, provided by the porter named Doisy. Monsieur Lepître either knew nothing of Doisy’s business, or he winked at it. The man was a perfect smuggler, made much of by the boys in their own interest; he was the screen for all our mischief, our confidant when we stole in after hours, our go-between with the lending library for prohibited books. Breakfast with a cup of coffee was in the most aristocratic taste, in consequence of the exorbitant price to which colonial products rose under Napoleon. If the use of coffee and of sugar was a luxury to our parents, in us it was a sign of such arrogant superiority as was enough to give us a passion for it, if the tendency to imitation, greediness, and the infection of fashion had not been enough. Doisy gave us credit; he supposed that every schoolboy must have sisters or aunts who would uphold his honor and pay his debts.
For a long time I resisted the blandishments of the coffee-bar. If my judges could have known the force of temptation, the heroic efforts of my soul to attain to such stoicism, and the suppressed rages of my long resistance, they would have dried away my tears instead of provoking them to flow. But, boy as I was, could I have acquired the magnanimity which leads us to scorn the scorn of others? And I was also feeling perhaps the temptations of various social vices whose power was increased by my longing.
At the end of the second year my father and mother came to Paris. The day of their arrival was announced to me by my brother; he was living in Paris, but had not paid me a single visit. My sisters were to come too, and we were all to see Paris together. The first day we were to dine at the Palais-Royal to be close to the Théâtre-Français. In spite of the intoxicating delight of such a programme of unhoped for joys, my glee was mitigated by the sense of a coming storm, which so easily blights those who are inured to troubles. I had to confess a debt of a hundred francs to the Sieur Doisy, who threatened to apply to my parents for the money. I determined to make use of my brother as Doisy’s dragoman, to plead my repentance and mediate for forgiveness. My father was in favor of mercy: but my mother was relentless; her dark-blue eye petrified me, and she fulminated terrible forecasts.
“If I allowed myself such licenses at seventeen, what should I become later? Could I be a son of hers? Did I want to ruin the family? Was I the only child to be thought of? The career on which my brother Charles had embarked required an independent income, and he deserved it, for he had already done the family credit, while I should disgrace it. Did I know nothing of the value of the money I cost them? What benefit to my education would come of coffee and sugar? Was not such conduct an apprenticeship to every vice?” Marat was an angel as compared to me.
After enduring the shock of this torrent, which filled my soul with terrors, my brother took me back to the boardinghouse, I lost my dinner at the Trois Frères Provençaux, and was deprived of seeing Talma in Britannicus. This was my interview with my mother after a parting of twelve years.
When I had gone through the
