I raised my eyes, and beheld each pupil perched on a barrel, in the same attitude and performing the same action, as the Manneken-Pis fountain of Brussels. The fountains were playing in honour of my arrival.
Such a manner of reception displeased me greatly. I took to my heels, in order to protect myself from this novel kind of shower-bath; but I had stood for a moment in hesitation and astonishment; then, when my mind was made up, I had had five or six paces to go before I was free; so, when I came out of the vault-like passage, I was streaming all over.
I was by nature very tearful. Often, as a child, I would sit down in a corner and cry without any reason. Then, as I always spoke of myself, like Cæsar, in the third person, and as they had adopted this manner of addressing me, for the fun of it, my mother would come to me and ask:
"Why is Dumas crying?"
"Dumas cries," I would reply, "because Dumas has tears."
This answer relieved her of all uneasiness, and nearly always satisfied my mother, who would go away laughing, leaving me to cry on at my leisure.
If I cried without any motive, the reader will readily understand that, when there was a strong incentive, there was all the more reason why I should give way to torrents of tears.
What more justifiable excuse could I have had than the humiliation to which I had just been subjected and the injury it had just done my new suit?
Therefore, when the Abbé Grégoire came by to say mass, he found me on the steps, in floods of water, like the Biblis of M. Dupaty.
The abbé had scarcely come in view when my schoolfellows came up to me, surrounded me in rings on the staircase, and, with every appearance of deep interest, asked each other why I was crying. The Abbé Grégoire broke through the hypocritical circle, ascended two or three steps, and, putting up his eyeglass, for he was as blind as a mole, looked at me and asked me what was the matter.