I spent the greater part of my time at a gunsmith's who lived opposite us.
He was called Montagnon. He had a son who took lessons with me from Abbé Grégoire, and who died of nervous exhaustion. They let me see him when he was laid out, and the sight completed the cure begun by M. Tissot.
I did not give up frequenting the father's shop after the death of his son, my companion; for the firearms there were what I loved above all else.
Amongst these firearms I found the single-barrelled gun which I had taken down on the day after my father's death, with which to kill God. I was to have that gun when I was big;—now, this definition when I was big was utterly vague, and tormented me greatly. I thought I was by now quite big enough, for I was growing taller than the gun.
The consequence of my assiduous attendance at Montagnon's shop was that I became more learned in my knowledge of a gunsmith's trade than in translation; and I could take to pieces and put together again as complicated a mechanism as the breeching of a gun as well, and almost as ingeniously, as the cleverest gunsmith.
Old Montagnon would tell me that it was my vocation, and offered to take me free of premium as an apprentice; but he was mistaken, my enthusiasm did not go to that length.
The rest of my time was spent in making weapons with Mounier, or in going bird-snaring, or decoying, with my two best friends Saulnier and Arpin.
In these leisure times it was very rarely that a day passed without my receiving a dressing down on account of my political opinions!
Everybody had an opinion about the end of 1814 and the beginning of 1815, and generally each opinion was very strongly held; only, these opinions were not divided into as many shades as the colours in a rainbow, as nowadays, but were divided into two sharply defined colours—you were either a Royalist or a Bonapartist. The Republican party had passed away and Liberals had not yet appeared; there were no such parties as Saint Simonism, Fourierism, Democracy, Socialism, Cabétism.