When we came to the first houses on our return home, I left M. Picot; I was most anxious to go through the town with my gun under my arm and the larks round my neck.
No Pompey or Cæsar entered Rome with more triumphant pride than I felt.
But, alas! everything decays in this world, joy, grief, and even vanity! A time came when, like Cæsar, I gave up my triumphs to my lieutenants.
One thought and one only used to fill my mind: and that was the promised shooting for the following Sunday, if the Abbé Grégoire was satisfied with me.
We know how my translations were done; I did not think it wise to change my practices; but I paid so much attention to my compositions that the abbé declared that if I went on so well, I should, in a year's time, be able to enter the sixth form of any Parisian college.
I also learned, for my own satisfaction, two or three hundred lines of Virgil. Although I was very bad at Latin, I have always loved Virgil. His pity for exiles, his melancholy consciousness of death, his feeling after an unknown God, completely won me from the very first; the music of his verse and its metrical ease delighted me extremely, and often lulls me to sleep even now. I knew long passages of the Æneid by heart, and I believe I could still repeat from beginning to end Æneas's narration to Dido, though I could not construe a Latin sentence without making three or four grammatical errors.
The longed-for Sunday came at last! Again I spent a sleepless night, again I went through the same emotion in the morning, again I felt the same excitement at setting off. This time we did not use the mirror, but simply shot right and left; the partridges seemed to fly off to tremendous distances. No matter! I went on firing all the same; only, I hit nothing. But when we reached the crest of one of the high hills (called in our parts larris) I surprised a covey of young partridges, which rose within gun-shot. I fired off my gun at haphazard: one of the two partridges flew as far as it could, but by the angle of its downward flight I saw that it was wounded.
"Hit!" cried M. Picot.
I had, of course, seen that it was hit, and I set off after it.
Only when I felt myself rushing down the steep slope did I realise my rashness. When I had gone about twenty steps I was not running, I was leaping down; at the end of thirty I was no longer leaping, I was flying, and I felt I should lose my balance any moment; my speed increased in proportion to my weight; I became a living example of Galileo's squares of distances. M. Picot saw my break-neck pace, but was unable to save me, although I was rushing down headlong towards a spot where the mountain was cut into perpendicularly by a quarry-opening. I myself could see the direction in which I was going without being able to stop myself. The wind had already carried my cap away; I threw down my gun as I reached the open space. Suddenly the ground gave way from under me, I leapt or rather I fell a distance of ten or a dozen feet, and I disappeared in the snow, which happily the wind had collected in a soft eider-down quilt about a yard deep where I fell!