These three houses were those of Madame Darcourt, M. Deviolaine, and M. Collard. It will be remembered that I have already had occasion to speak of these three persons, and I may be permitted to say a little about them, were it only to discharge the debt of gratitude we owe them. Moreover, pictures of the kind I am about to draw are nothing without their accessary details.
Madame Darcourt was our neighbour; she resided on the ground floor of the house adjoining the one in which my father died. She was the widow of a distinguished military surgeon. She had two children, a son and a daughter. The son might have been twenty-eight, and his name was Antoine. The daughter was perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five, and was called Éléonore.
God granted the mother a long and happy life—she lived to eighty years of age.
I hardly knew Antoine, but I was almost brought up by Éléonore.
The great attraction to me about this house, besides their kindness to me, was a splendid edition of Buffon with coloured pictures.
Every evening, after my mother had made her visit to the cemetery,—a religious office she never missed one single day,—whilst she sat absorbed in her grief in a corner by the fireplace, whilst Madame Darcourt and her daughter sewed, they would put a volume of Buffon in my hands, and were then relieved of any further trouble on my account throughout the evening.
In consequence I learnt to read—and though I do not know how, I can say why: I wanted to read about the history, the habits, the instincts of the animals whose portraits I looked at. The result of this interest of mine in batrachians, and especially in ophidians, was such that, at the age when children are still spelling, I had already read all the books other which form a child's library.
While at Madame Darcourt's house I experienced the sensation of fear for the first time—a feeling hitherto totally unknown to me.
My mania for reading extended in every direction, even to newspapers—in later years so little read by me.
One day I came upon the Journal de l'Empire, and I read in it a short article relating how a prisoner, entombed in the dungeons of Amiens, had been devoured there by a snake.