But all this is not very orthodox; all this may be Christian enough but hardly Catholic; it was therefore feared that I should not turn out a very edifying example of piety.
Those who thought so could not grasp the fact that my apparent want of religious feeling was really from my excess of religious emotion.
It was just the same with prayers as with the rules of arithmetic; I never could learn more than three: "Our Father," "Hail Mary," and "I believe in God." Moreover, I only knew these in French, and not word for word: they tried to teach me them in Latin, but, as I had not yet become at that time a pupil of the Abbé Grégoire, I declined to learn them, saying that I wanted to understand what I was asking God for, to which they replied that God understood all languages.
"Never mind!" I insisted; "it isn't enough for me that God understands, I must understand too."
And I obtained leave to learn my prayers in French.
But, in spite of my Gallican prayers and my imperfect attention to the instruction of the Catechism, there were two persons, my mother and the Abbé Grégoire, who never doubted my religious tendencies.
And, more than that, the Abbé Grégoire, who was only a curate, obtained for me, in spite of the strictness of the Abbé Remy, the priest of the church at Villers-Cotterets, the supreme honour of being allowed to renew my baptismal vows.
The matter had long been talked of, and the Abbé Grégoire had to make himself personally responsible for his pupil.
A week beforehand I was given the vows of baptism, copied in Oblet's very finest handwriting; the next day I knew them by heart.
The day before the ceremony, my mother found me absorbed in reading a book which seemed to cast a spell over all my faculties. She never doubted for an instant that the book I was thus so taken up with was the Imitation of Christ, or the Pratique du Chretien: she approached me gently and read over my shoulder.