Now, as a private boarder, and free from attending classes, I hoped for a truce between misery and me. But notwithstanding that I was now nineteen—or perhaps because I was nineteen—my father continued the system which had of old sent me to school without sufficient food, to college without pocket-money, and had run me into debt to Doisy. I had very little money at my command, and what can be done in Paris without money? My liberty, too, was ingeniously fettered. Monsieur Lepître always sent me to the law-schools with an usher at my heels, who handed me over to the professor, and came again to escort me back. A girl would have been watched with less care than my mother’s fears devised for my protection. Paris had justifiable terrors for my parents. Students are secretly interested in the selfsame thoughts as fill the heads of schoolgirls; do what you will, a girl always talks of lovers, a youth of women.
But in Paris at that time the conversation of fellow-students was tinged by the Oriental and Sultan-like world of the Palais-Royal. The Palais-Royal was an Eldorado of love where ingots ready coined were current every evening. Virgin doubts were there enlightened, and there our curiosity might find gratification. The Palais-Royal and I were asymptotes, ever tending to meet, but never meeting.
This is how fate thwarted my hopes. My father had introduced me to one of my aunts, who lived in the Île Saint-Louis, and I was to dine there every Thursday and Sunday, escorted thither by Madame or Monsieur Lepître, who went out themselves on those days, and called for me on their way home in the evening. A singular form of recreation! The Marquise de Listomère was a very ceremonious fine lady, to whom it never occurred to make me a present of a crown-piece. As old as a cathedral, as much painted as a miniature, and magnificently dressed, she lived in her mansion just as though Louis XV were still alive, seeing none but old ladies and gentlemen, a company of fossils among whom I felt as if I were in a cemetery. No one ever spoke to me, and I had not the courage to speak first. Cold looks of aversion made me feel ashamed of my youth, which was so annoying to all the others.
I hoped for the success of an escapade based on their indifference, making up my mind to steal off one evening directly after dinner and fly to the wooden galleries. My aunt, when once she was absorbed in whist, paid no further heed to me. Jean, her manservant, cared little enough for Monsieur Lepître; but those ill-starred dinners were, unfortunately, lengthy in consequence of the antiquity of the jaws or the weakness of the teeth of that ancient company.
At last, one evening between eight and nine, I had got as far as the stairs, as tremulous as Bianca Capello when she made her escape; but just as the porter had let me out, I saw Monsieur Lepître’s cab in the street, and the worthy man asking for me in his wheezy tones. Three times did fate come between the hell of the Palais-Royal and the paradise of my youth. On the day when, ashamed of being so ignorant, and already twenty, I determined to defy every peril to gain my end—at the very moment when I was about to evade Monsieur Lepître as he got into a hackney coach (a difficult matter, for he had a club foot, and was as stout as Louis XVIII)—who should appear but my mother, arriving in a post-chaise. I was riveted by her eye, and stood like a bird fascinated by a serpent.
What chance had led to this meeting? Nothing could be simpler. Napoleon was making a last effort. My father, foreseeing the return of the Bourbons, had come to explain matters to my brother, who was already embarked in diplomacy under the Imperial rule. He had come from Tours with my mother. My mother had undertaken to convey me home, to remove me from the dangers which, to those who were keen enough to follow the advance of the enemy, seemed to threaten the capital. Thus, in a few minutes I was snatched from Paris, just as my residence there would have proved fateful.
The torments of an imagination forever agitated by thwarted desires, and the weariness of a life saddened by constant privations, had thrown me into study, just as in former times men weary of life shut themselves up in cloisters. Study had become a passion with me, which might have blighted me utterly by imprisoning me at an age when young men ought to be free to enjoy the activities of their natural springtime.
This slight sketch of my early years, in which you can imagine much sadness, was necessary to give you some idea of the effect of that training on my later life. Bearing the stamp of so many adverse influences, at the age of twenty I was stunted, thin, and pale. My spirit, full of cravings, struggled with a body which was frail indeed in appearance, but which—as an old doctor of Tours was wont to say—was going through the last annealing process of an iron temperament. Young in body and old in mind, I had read and thought so much, that I was metaphysically familiar with life in its highest summits, just when I was about to explore the tortuous difficulties of its narrow passes and the sandy ways of its plains. Exceptional chances had kept me late in that delightful phase when the soul is conscious of its first agitation, when it is opening to its first raptures, when everything is fresh and full of savor. I was standing between boyhood prolonged by study, and manhood late in
