Since I have lived in Italy, and, above all, in Rome, I have discovered a third.
Oh! what a happy day that opening day of the shooting season was! How well I remember it! It made me the indefatigable sportsman I have since been, the despair of gamekeepers!
The abbé, on his side, was well pleased with my power of walking, which he found greatly superior to my brains; he made me some jeering compliments upon it, and I felt the full value of them; but he had given me so much pleasure that I had not the courage to be angry with him.
I remained a fortnight with the Abbé Fortier, and I would fain have stayed with him all my life; but my mother wanted me home: it was my first long absence. And she, poor woman, had wanted to send me to a Seminary! She wrote that she should die of ennui if they did not send me back soon.
The abbé shrugged his shoulders and said:
"Very well, let him be sent back!"
Sensitiveness was not a weakness the abbé suffered from.
They put me on a donkey and took me to Crépy, where, twice a week, there was a connection with Villers-Cotterets by means of an old woman, called mother Sabot, and her ass.
I passed from my ass to mother Sabot's, and the same evening I was back at Villers-Cotterets.